The LqrCarver objects are initialized from a plain buffer representing an image. The default constructor assumes a colour depth of 8 bits per channel:

Here, buffer is the array representing an image of size width by height with channels colour channels per pixels. Thus, the overall buffer size has to be of widht * height * channels unsigned characters, and ordered such that the k-th colour of the pixel at row y and column x is found at:

buffer[(y * width + x) * channels + k]

(this assumes that x, y and k all start from 0 and reach the maximum values widht-1, height-1 and channels-1, respectively)

The function returns a pointer to the newly allocated LqrCarver upon success, or NULL in case of insufficient memory.

In order to create LqrCarver objects with more than 8 bits per channel, an extended version of the constructor must be used:

The differnece with the default version is that the input buffer must be passed as void, and its type must be specified through the additional parameter colour_depth, which can take one of the following values:

Floating point type values must range between 0 and 1.

The newly created LqrCarver consists only of the image buffer plus an uninitialized visibility map. If one had a previously computed visibility map, it could be imported into the LqrCarver and that would be enough (see the Importing a visibility map in a carver section). If the visibility map has to be computed, the LqrCarver needs to be initialized through this function:

Here, delta_x is the maximum allowed transversal step of the seams (0 means straight seams, the typical value is 1), while the rigidity parameter can be used to introduce a global bias for non-straight seams (the typical value is 0; a nonzero value can be modulated locally for specific areas using the functions described in section Adding a rigidity mask).