Contour-Maintaining-Based Image Adaption for an Efficient Ambulance Service in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Ambulance services play a vital role in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In an intelligent ambulance system, the medical images can help doctors quickly and accurately understand the patients' condition during first aid. On various display devices in different kinds of ambulances, content-aware image adaption can be used to better present the medical image among different display resolutions and aspect ratios. Most existing methods mainly focus on visual protection of salient areas, such as specific organ parts of the human body, with less attention paid to the visual effect of unimportant areas. However, the human visual system is more sensitive to the edge and contour of images, which are important for ambulance services. To improve the visual effect of adapted images, a contour-maintaining-based image adaption method for an efficient ambulance service in ITS is proposed here. Firstly, the proposed method innovatively combines the weighted gradient, saliency, and edge maps into an importance map. Secondly, energy is optimized for reducing contour distortion and interruption according to the visual slope and curvature of contours and edges in non-salient areas. Finally, applying the sub-procedure of a forward seam carving method, the optimal seams can more evenly pass through the contour areas. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is more effective than other similar methods.