Panorama Stitching, Rick Szeliski's Work Is the Best Options

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

I noticed the thread on Photosynth and thought I would add a little more about that research group. I know Rick Szeliski and Matt Uyttendaele, very smart people.

I've tried pretty much all of the panorama stitchers out there. Adobe's is by far the worst, and Microsoft's is by far the best. Szeliski's algorithms are currently found in Microsoft Image Suite 2006. Unlike most stitchers, it is based on a robust treatment of the general camera projective transformations, so it can handle rotations, panning, zooming and even limited camera-position changes (modulo big visiblity changes of course).

[attachment=7042:attachment]

Here's an example that first impressed me. In a Soviet documentary film I own, they discuss this diagram of the Venera soil-drilling apparatus, but they never show the whole diagram. They pan around and zoom in and out, and I didn't expect to be able to resolve all that into one image. I was quite surprised when Rick's program did it.

An updated version of the stitcher is in a new product, Microsoft Graphic Designer, which will give users more control over a big class of transformations (affine, homography, 3D rotation, etc). It handles lens distortion and a variety of projection surfaces. I haven't tried it myself yet. link

I have Panorama Factory and Autostitcher of course, but I never use them now, they are nowhere near as powerful as DIS2006.

Uyttendaele also recommended a program to me called ptlens for some non-projective transformations like vignetting.

[Malmer]

Thats very cool.

I have used ptGui and it works very well. Will look at MDIS as well. Im thinking about using stitching software to create panoramas from the Apollo television broadcasts from the moon. (would be interesting to use stacking and superresolution on it as well.)

(I just bought the spacecraft films big DVD box with all the material from the moon. i think its about 80Hrs of film. Fantastic!)

Its also useful to use 3d tracking software and depth from stereo to generate dense Z information. then its possible to create VR worlds from panoramas that where shot with a moving camera. (takes a bit of work..)

/Mattias

[mars loon]

Mattias,

very nice job on your immense saturn portrait published on APOD at christmastime a few years ago

ken

[Malmer]

Mattias,

very nice job on your immense saturn portrait published on APOD at christmastime a few years ago

ken

Thanx!

I actuall did not stitch that one using any automatic software. i did it by hand. I made that picture the same day it came down from cassini and had it on my machine for a month of so. Then scince Nasa did not seem to ever release it i thought that I would. I emailed it to the apod people and they had it shown on cristmas eve.

Then I got an email from Carolyn Porco...

...and Im not going to publish anything i have done from any ongoing missions anymore.


/M