“Distributed Gradient-Domain Processing of Planar and Spherical Images” by Kazhdan, Surendran and Hoppe

Gradient-domain processing is widely used to edit and combine images. In this article we extend the framework in two directions. First, we adapt the gradient-domain approach to operate on a spherical domain, to enable operations such as seamless stitching, dynamic-range compression, and gradient-based sharpening over spherical imagery. An efficient streaming computation is obtained using a new spherical parameterization with bounded distortion and localized boundary constraints. Second, we design a distributed solver to efficiently process large planar or spherical images. The solver partitions images into bands, streams through these bands in parallel within a networked cluster, and schedules computation to hide the necessary synchronization latency. We demonstrate our contributions on several datasets including the Digitized Sky Survey, a terapixel spherical scan of the night sky.

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