Project 2 writeup

Alex Hills (ahills)
February 18, 2010

Poisson image blending combines two pictures using a mask to determine what parts of a source image should be blended with what in a target image. The simplest description of it is that the color gradient of the source image is used to bleed the colors of the target image to recreate the source image, while maintaining a smooth blend. Sharp edges distract the eye, and make a viewer think that something doesn't belong.

This algorithm involves finding the solution to a poisson system, where each pixel in the target image under the mask is dependent only on its neighbors and the color gradient from the source image. This creates a large system of linear equations (equivalent to the number of pixels to the image, a very large matrix). Thus, the only real way to do this (and not take up a completely unreasonable amount of space) is to use a sparse matrix.

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