A parallel framework for fast photomosaics

Main bottleneck of photomosaic algorithm is a search for a best matched image. Unlike several techniques which use fast approximation search for increasing the speed, we propose a parallel framework for fast photomosaic using a programmable GPU. This paper suggests a design of vertex structure for a best match searching on each cell of photomosaic grid and shows a texture representation of image database. The shader programs which are used for searching a best match and rendering image tiles into a display are presented. In addition, a simple duplicate reduction and color correction methods are proposed. Our algorithm not only offers dramatic enhancement of speed, but also always guarantees the 'exact' result.