Found this while having a beer in Stuttgart, Germany. Video of the excellent paper presented by Shai Avidan from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) and Ariel Shamir
from The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC)/Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL).
From their excellent Paper titled Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing:
Seam carving is a method for content-aware resizing that changes the size of an image according to its content. This paper shows applications to aspect-ratio change, image retargeting, and object removal.
More info on the technique can be found in this PDF file.