Clouds in hi resolution pano (Celeste 2.0?)

hi all,

I'm currently dealing with a lot of clouds (when traveling quickly
through many locations I have no other choice than take the meteo
conditions as they are). Since the introduction of Celeste (that works
great, thanks Tim!) this is no longer an issue for the proper
alignment and stitching of everything but the clouds. However in multi-
rows high resolution shots the clouds end up being an issue at the
blending stage. The rows become visible.

The lazy way to deal with this is to mask out the sky and replace it
with whatever photo editor is at hand, but the result inevitably looks
artificial (shade zones on the mountains and so).

When Tim was coding Celeste, we sparred about what kind of mask should
Celeste generate around the clouds, if any.

Now, having such a mask could be useful for the following idea,
assuming the clouds movement is constant throughout the photoshooting:
1. generate control points for the static parts in the image. Use them
to position the images in relationship to one another and create the
master panoramas, using Celeste to prune CPs from the clouds and mask
the coulded areas.
2. generate control points in the clouds (area masked by Celeste) and
calculate the translation related to the positioning in 1 (which is
the translation vector multiplied by the time differential between the
reference image and the current image)
3. use the translated cloud images to generate an additional panorama
of the sky
4. mask the sky out from the static panorama and add the sky panorama
as a layer

there will be some areas of the sky that will be "empty" (e.g. when a
cloud moves behind an object or out from it), but those will be much
smaller areas to deal with in an image editor than generating the sky
artificially or dealing with the shift across all images.

to do this we need:
- an additional category of CPs to compose the sky panorama (sky-CPs)
- a measurement of the displacement of those CPs related to the
position of the image in the static pano
- some math to average / optimize the displacement measures
- some glue/script to generate the second panorama
- a tool to mask the sky from the rest of the panorama (I don't think
that Celeste's mask are fine enough for that).
- some glue/script to add the mask and the sky to the resulting
panorama.

does this sound logic? or have I missed something? should I record
this as a feature request? maybe a future GSoC project?

Yuv
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