There's also the approach that calculates the energy of the resulting image as opposed to the seam being removed, which allows the seams to pass through objects where doing so will minimize artifacts.
Thanks for sharing - it's kind of sad that nobody ever seems to know about the significantly better forward energy version. Especially since it's such a minor tweak.
Paper: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/vidret/index.html
GitHub: https://github.com/axu2/improved-seam-carving