\http://www.iaeme.com/IJCIET/index.asp 106 editor@iaeme.com International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology (IJCIET) Volume 10, Issue 04, April 2019, pp. 106-113, Article ID: IJCIET_10_04_012 Available online at http://www.iaeme.com/ijciet/issues.asp?JType=IJCIET&VType=10&IType=04 ISSN Print: 0976-6308 and ISSN Online: 0976-6316 © IAEME Publication Scopus Indexed IMAGE ENHANCEMENT BY SEAM CARVING / MSR ALGORITHM M. K. Maaroof Department of Computer and Mathematic Faculty of Basic education, Babylon University, Iraq ABSTRACT Conventional methods such as cropping or resampling can introduce more losses in information or distortion in resolution. In this paper we propose an improved seam carving algorithm which incorporates multi scale retinex techniques. We propose a MSR improvement for image enhancement. MSR is used on images under non uniform illumination in terms of either color or lightness and has satisfactory results to achieve color constancy and dynamic range compression. MSR is extremely sensitive to noise speckles that cameras produce in low light areas, and it has unsatisfactory effect on areas with normal or intensive illumination. Moreover, MSR uses a gain-offset method for prior-to-display treatment and can lead to apparent data loss on images. This study replaces the logarithm function in MSR with a customized sigmoid function to minimize data loss, and adapts MSR to images by merging results from sigmoid-MSR with seam carving on original images. Experiments show our framework, when applied to images, can preserve areas with normal or intensive lighting and suppress noise speckles in extreme low light areas, we have demonstrated superior performance upon the current seam carving –multi scale retinex methods. Keyword head: image resizing, seam carving, multi scale retinex algorithm. Cite this Article: M. K. Maaroof, Image Enhancement by Seam Carving / Msr Algorithm. International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology, 10(04), 2019, pp. 106-113 http://www.iaeme.com/IJCIET/issues.asp?JType=IJCIET&VType=10&IType=04 1. INTRODUCTION when the rise of mobile media device such as smart phones, content aware image resizing, or image retargeting, is fast becoming an important research area. We need to resize images and videos to fit various device displays with different aspect ratios in a way that increasing information and decreasing distortion. Traditional methods including resampling and cropping had been option up until a few years ago. In these work of 2007, Avidan and Shamir proposed a rather elegant solution called seam carving, which operates in a discrete fashion, reducing an image’s dimension by one row or column at each step [1][2]. Later solutions by Wolf et al.