Question

I have implemented an image blending method for seamless blending using plain C++. Now I want to convert this code for GPU (using OpenGL ES 2 Shaders for mobile devices). Basically the method creates Gaussian and Laplacian Pyramides for each image which are then combined from low-resolution to top (see also the paper “The Laplacian Pyramid as a Compact Image Code” from Burt et.al. 1983).

My problem is that the Laplacian pyramid levels can have negative values but my devices do not support float or integer type textures (using the ORB_texture_float extension e.g.).

I already looked for papers dealing with GPU-based pyramids but without finding something really useful.

1. How can I implement such a pyramid efficiently for a GPU?
2. Is it possible to calculate a Gaussian/Laplacian pyramid level without iterating through the preceding levels?

Regards,

EDIT
It seems as if there is no “good” way to calculate Laplacian Pyramids completely on GPU except using two passes (one for signs, one for values) which do not have support for either signed types (for instance ARB_texture_float) or types larger than byte when the the image’s data range is between [0..255]. My Laplacian Pyramid runs perfectly on GPUs with ARB_texture_float extension but without the extension (and some adjustments to compress the range) the pyramid gets “wrong” due to range compression.

Answer 1

1. The safest way for you to implement a Laplacian pyramid if your textures are unsigned integers is to store two pyramids – one pyramid that contains the gradient magnitude of the Laplacian and another pyramid that stores the sign of the pixel at that location.

2. Yes. Any level in a Gaussian or Laplacian pyramid has a closed form solution based on the sigma value that you want to compute. Consider the base case of a LoG pyramid computed at intervals of sigma = (2/3). The first level of the pyramid has sigma 2/3 and is produced simply by convolving with a 5×5 LoG filter with sigma 2/3. The second convolution with the same filter produces an LoG image with sigma 4/3, and finally the third has sigma 6/3, or 2, so we subsample the image to produce the next integer level of the pyramid. If you want to compute the LoG of an image at sigma 2, the levels at sigma 2/3 and 4/3 are not necessary – simply subsample the image one time and convolve with an LoG filter with sigma 1.

If you want to compute the LoG at sigma = 20, quad-subsample the image (16 pixel blocks become 1 pixel) to give you a sigma 16 image, then convolve once with a sigma 4/3 LoG filter.