Nowadays showing images with different dimensions on various displays has become an important issue because of the advancement in multimedia technology and extensive use of some devices such as cell phones and cameras. This can be done using image resizing algorithms. The main idea in all existing methods is to change the image size so that the overall visual quality of the produced image is preserved with respect to original image. Superiority of these algorithms is measured according to their capability to better preserve the structure of important objects in image against distortion. These methods are generally categorized to continuous methods and discrete methods. Naive methods such as scaling and cropping did not pay attention to image contents during its resizing. Therefore seam carving method was proposed as an intelligent discrete method. In this method the importance of each pixel in the image is estimated using an energy function. An importance map is created and is used to select and remove the most proper pixels in the image that are called seam. The most proper seam consists of the least important pixels that have the lowest values in image importance map.In this thesis we use different importance criteria to define different energy functions that preserve overall visual quality and consequently preserve the structure and important contents of the image. Application of the proposed energy functions in this thesis leads to improvement in final image quality in seam carving method. On the other hand when the image size decreases very much, it will not possible to avoid distortion even with the strongest energy functions. In this case a combination of scaling and seam carving can distribute the distortion all over the image and improve the final image quality.The produced results from this method preserve the overall structure of the scene and also protect its salient objects against the distortion that is caused from decrement in image size. Subjective comparison method that is used for evaluating the results of image resizing algorithms shows good performance of our proposed algorithm. Comparison between obtained results from our proposed method and existing methods confirms that our produced images have better visual quality with respect to previous methods. Keywords: Image Resizing, Seam Carving, Energy Map, Importance Criterion, Scaling, Distortion, Visual Quality