AIR-DR: Adaptive Image Retargeting with Instance Relocation and Dual-guidance Repainting

Image retargeting aims to adjust the aspect ratio of images to accommodate various display devices. While existing methods consider both foreground semantics and background inpainting, their Seam-carving-based framework is inherently destructive, often compromising the structural integrity of foreground instances. Furthermore, conventional inpainting models struggle to achieve pixel-level accuracy with global-only guidance, leading to local inconsistencies and background distortions. To address these challenges, we reformulate image retargeting as a instance-level re-layout task. By Adaptive Instance Relocation and Dual-guidance Repainting (AIR-DR), our method preserves the structural integrity of the foreground and recovers the background with consistent details. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive retargeting decision that maintains robustness across challenging retargeting scenarios and any ratios. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets across various aspect ratios demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods in both objective metrics and subjective evaluations. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component.