Abstract: A method and apparatus for processing an image by adding a border to the image, where said border has a width that is proportional to the extent of a filter used during image processing. Specifically, the processing reduces an image to produce an image pyramid and expands an image pyramid to produce an image. At each pass through the reduction or expansion process, the border is added to the image being processed, where the border has a width that is at least as large as an extent of a filter used in the reduction or expansion process.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for assessing the visibility of differences between two input signal sequences, e.g., image sequences is disclosed. The apparatus comprises a perceptual metric generator having an input signal processing section, a luminance processing section, a chrominance processing section and a perceptual metric generating section.

Abstract: A method and apparatus that determines the topology of a sequence of images and then globally aligns the images with respect to each image's neighboring images. The apparatus includes a topology determination module, a local coarse registration module, a local fine registration module, a global consistency module, and a color matching/blending module. To accurately render a mosaic image from a sequence of images the topology determination and global alignment processes are iterated to progressively produce accurately aligned images. The apparatus efficiently and accurately combines a plurality of source images into a seamless panoramic mosaic representation of a scene, of arbitrarily wide spatial and angular extent, regardless of the order of image acquisition.

Abstract: A method of constructing an image mosaic comprising the steps of selecting source images, aligning the source images, selecting source segments, enhancing the images, and merging the images to form the image mosaic is disclosed. An apparatus for constructing an image mosaic comprising means for selecting source images, means for aligning the source images, means for selecting source image segments, means for enhancing the images, and means for merging the images to form the image mosaic is also disclosed. The process may be performed automatically by the system or may be guided interactively by a human operator. Applications include the construction of photographic quality prints form video and digital camera images.