How to efficiently merge two overlapping contours into one big contour? - opencv

Question

I have a huge image ( about 63000 x 63000 pixels = 3969 Megapixels )
what i have done so far is i decided to make "tiles" of (1024 x 1024) and do my calculations based on these tiles, resulting in an 62 x 62 image tile grid!
(this works out very well and has the advantage of making the image viewable with zoom-in and zoom out, only viewn tiles are downsized for example)
But what i need now are the contours from the huge image!
i use the OpenCV function "findContours" to detect contours on each
one of the tiles.
i have added some overlap in the tiles so i get
overlapping contours ( 1 pixel overlap )
i used the offset parameter
of "findContours" to shift the contours to the right position
into the "virtual total image"
Here are some screenshot's i made from a demo application
What I want is this:
Now my questions:
is it possible to stitch the contours, my worst case is a contour which covers the total image... is there some library that can do this?
is there a library which works on a compressed version of the total image ( like rle for example )
is there a way to make opencv findcontours work on 1 bit binary images ?
Here's the code used by findcontours:
// Surf2DTiledData ...a gobject based class used for 2d tile management and viewing..
Surf2DTiledData* td = (Surf2DTiledData*)in_td;
int nr_hor_tiles = surf2_d_tiled_data_get_nr_hor_tiles(td);
int nr_ver_tiles = surf2_d_tiled_data_get_nr_ver_tiles(td);
int tile_size_x = surf2_d_tiled_data_get_tile_width(td);
int tile_size_y = surf2_d_tiled_data_get_tile_height(td);
contouring_data_obj = surf2_d_tiled_data_get_ContouringData(td);
p_contours = contouring_data_obj->p_contours;
p_border_contours = contouring_data_obj->p_border_contours;
g_return_if_fail(p_border_contours != NULL);
g_return_if_fail(p_contours != NULL);
for (y = 0; y < nr_ver_tiles; y++){
int x;
for (x = 0; x < nr_hor_tiles; x++){
int idx = x + y*nr_hor_tiles;
CvMemStorage *mem = contouring_data_obj->contour_storage[idx];
CvMat _src;
CvSeq *contours = NULL;
uchar* dataBuffer = (uchar*)p_data[x][y];
// the idea is to have some extra space available for the overlap
// detection of contours!
// the extra space is needed for the algorithm to check for
// overlaps of contours later on!
#define VIRT_BORDER_EXTEND 2
int virtual_x = x * tile_size_x - VIRT_BORDER_EXTEND;
int virtual_y = y * tile_size_y - VIRT_BORDER_EXTEND;
int virtual_width = tile_size_x + VIRT_BORDER_EXTEND * 2;
int virtual_height = tile_size_y + VIRT_BORDER_EXTEND * 2;
int x_off = -VIRT_BORDER_EXTEND;
int y_off = -VIRT_BORDER_EXTEND;
if (virtual_x < 0) {
virtual_width += virtual_x;
virtual_x = 0;
x_off = 0;
}
if (virtual_y < 0) {
virtual_height += virtual_y;
virtual_y = 0;
y_off = 0;
}
if ((virtual_x + virtual_width) > (nr_hor_tiles*tile_size_x)) {
virtual_width = nr_hor_tiles*tile_size_x - virtual_x;
}
if ((virtual_y + virtual_height) > (nr_ver_tiles*tile_size_y)) {
virtual_height = nr_ver_tiles*tile_size_y - virtual_y;
}
CvMat* _roi_mat = get_roi_mat(td,
virtual_x, virtual_y,
virtual_width, virtual_height);
// Use either this:
//mem = cvCreateMemStorage(0);
if (_roi_mat){
// CV_LINK_RUNS => different algorithm!!!!
int tile_off_x = tile_size_x * x;
int tile_off_y = tile_size_y * y;
CvPoint contour_shift = cvPoint(x_off + tile_off_x, y_off + tile_off_y);
int n = cvFindContours(_roi_mat, mem, &contours, sizeof(CvContour), CV_RETR_LIST, CV_CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE, contour_shift);
cvReleaseMat(&_roi_mat);
p_contours[x][y] = contours;
}
//cvReleaseMemStorage(&mem);
}
}
later i used opengl to make textures out of the tiles and for every tile there is a quad !
the opencv contours are not drawn as this could be too slow for now, but i draw their bounding boxes... which are drawn in opengl too..