colour based distortion

I know there is already a post on polar distortion, which I searched for after working on a landscape texture. I would love to be able to distort this texture so it can be perfectly mapped to a sphere. The best way to do this is a colour based distortion. Basically it takes two grayscale images one for vertical and one for horizontal distortion, and then applies those to the image, with the orogin of each pixel governed by the shade of grey in the distortion map.

In this example, the right of the image is 25% grey, so the pixel would be taken from 25% of the width of the image to the left.
image:

horizontal distortion map:

result:


I think that this would be a great addition to filterforge.

Were you talking about something like this..


test.ffxml

Good illustration, CFandM.
That's basically what I was talking about -- however if the image was not symmetrical, I think that left side would be a reflection of the right side (rather than just be the leftside without any offset change) -- because it's black instead of gray. (You seem to get a mirror wrap around effect if you offset far enough...)