Two-Pass Warp Algorithm For Hardware Implementation

A common requirement in remote sensing and cartography applications is that of warping an image to register with a reference image. A second order polynomial coordinate transformation on two-dimensional images embodies translation, rotation, scaling, and several types of warping. To perform this operation efficiently and with minimal hardware, the transformation is separated into a line operation followed by a column operation. These two transformations are computed using a least square fit algorithm. Resampling with bilinear or cubic convolution interpolation is also separable into the two-pass technique. This algorithm is suitable for hardware implementation of current image processing systems.