Development of a scalable image formation pipeline for multiscale gigapixel photography

We report on the image formation pipeline developed to efficiently form gigapixel-scale imagery generated by the AWARE-2 multiscale camera. The AWARE-2 camera consists of 98 "microcameras" imaging through a shared spherical objective, covering a 120° x 50° field of view with approximately 40 microradian instantaneous field of view (the angular extent of a pixel). The pipeline is scalable, capable of producing imagery ranging in scope from "live" one megapixel views to full resolution gigapixel images. Architectural choices that enable trivially parallelizable algorithms for rapid image formation and on-the-fly microcamera alignment compensation are discussed.