Adaptive Compositing and Navigation of Variable Resolution Images

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This variable resolution image has 7 captures and was processed by our pipeline to give a 47x effective zoom. Although the images are only 141MP and took 3 minutes to capture, our approach gives the sensation of zooming into a uniform 21.5GP image. Interesting details are provided as insets with corresponding seams. The full seam segmentation, navigation field, and comparisons are also provided.
Cody Licorish
Noura Faraj
Brian Summa
We present a new, high-quality compositing pipeline and navigation approach for variable resolution imagery. The motivation of this work is to explore the use of variable resolution images as a quick and accessible alternative to traditional gigapixel mosaics. Instead of the common tedious acquisition of many images using specialized hardware, variable resolution images can achieve similarly deep zooms as large mosaics, but with only a handful of images. For this approach to be a viable alternative, the state-of-the-art in variable resolution compositing needs to be improved to match the high-quality approaches commonly used in mosaic compositing. To this end, we provide a novel, variable resolution mosaic seam calculation and gradient domain color correction. This approach includes a new priority order graph cuts computation along with a practical data structure to keep memory overhead low. In addition, navigating variable resolution images is challenging, especially at the zoom factors targeted in this work. To address this challenge, we introduce a new image interaction for variable resolution imagery: a pan that automatically, and smoothly, hugs available resolution. Finally, we provide several real-world examples of our approach producing high-quality variable resolution mosaics with deep zooms typically associated with gigapixel photography.
	
@article{https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.14178,
author = {Licorish, C. and Faraj, N. and Summa, B.},
title = {Adaptive Compositing and Navigation of Variable Resolution Images},
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
volume = {40},
number = {1},
pages = {138-150},
keywords = {image segmentation, image and video processing, interaction techniques, interaction, matting and compositing, image and video processing},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.14178},
url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cgf.14178},
year = {2021}
}