Digital Image Acquisition and Continuous Zoom Display from Multiple-Resolution Views Using Heterogeneous Image Pyramids

There are many ways of capturing images to represent a detailed scene. Our motivation is to use inexpensive digital cameras with little setup requirements and to allow photographers to differentially capture both low-resolution overviews and high-resolution details. We present the heterogeneous image pyramid as a non-uniform representation composed of multiple captured multi-resolution images. Each resolution image captures a specific portion of the scene at the photographer's discretion with the desired resolution. These images are highly correlated since they are captured from the same scene. Consequently, these images can be registered and represented more compactly in a 3-dimensional spatial image pyramid called the heterogeneous image pyramid.