My introduction was this 2007 SIGGRAPH paper and talk
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1275808.1276390
https://youtu.be/6NcIJXTlugc
The basic concept is to add or remove "seams" of connected single-pixel rows or columns for better scaling/resizing. The Wikipedia article also has a pretty good explanation and examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_carving
Before and after examples from Wikipedia:

