Fast image blending for high-quality panoramic images on mobile phones

Abstract

This paper presents a fast image blending approach for combining a set of registered images into a composite mosaic with no visible seams and minimal texture distortion on mobile phones. A unique seam image is generated using two-pass nearest distance transform, which is independent on the order of input images and has good scalability. Each individual mask can be extracted from this seam image quickly. To promote blending speed and reduce memory usage in building high resolution image mosaics on mobile phones, the seam image and mask images are compressed using run-length encoding, and all the following mask operations are built on run-length encoding scheme. Moreover, single instruction multiple data instruction set is used in Gaussian and Laplacian pyramids construction to improve the blending speed further. The use of run-length encoding for masks processing leads to reduced memory requirements and a compact storage of the mask data, and the use of single instruction multiple data instruction set achieves better parallelism and faster execution speed on mobile phones.