[ptx] Enblend Multiresolution Spline Blender

[Max Lyons]

I've been working with Andews's code and have done exactly this (as well as a 
few other things).  I've been trying to (a) speed up enblend, and (b) reduce 
its memory requirements.  After making these changes, it was able to blend a 12 
shot, two row, 60 megapixel panorama in about an hour on my Athlon 1600 machine 
with 1.5GB ram (all computations fit into memory...no disk swapping).

It sounds like Andew has a lot of ideas for further development, so I may have 
duplicated some of his ideas.  However, if there is interest (and no 
objections), I'll post my version of the code and make it available for others.

Max



> 
> >I'll put some more images up on the enblend web page to better describe 
> >what you see on each level. I need to modify enblend to output these 
> >intermediate data structures anyway so I can hunt down some ways to save 
> >memory - it's using too much to stitch anything bigger than 60 megapixels 
> >or so except on really big machines.
> >  
> >
> 
> I haven't read the details of the blend algorithm, but it is not 
> possible to
> 
> a) only build the laplacian pyramid for the overlap areas,
> b) blend pairs of images by calculating the blend, then flatten the 
> image and do the next piece (what if three images overlap...?)
> 
> Ed W