http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/ice.html

Now available.

Just mount your camera to a tripod, shoot some images of your room or outside and drag them into the ICE.

It will stitch them together nearly perfect. You then select export size...100%...HD View (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_View) and, after installing the HD View plugin (1MB) for Firefox or IE you are blown away.



Really lame 2D render of my PS3 doing its thing:

That's pretty poor stitching TBH, you can achieve MUCH better (essentially seamless) with freeware apps like Hugin (and the autopano and enblend/smartblend hugin uses behind the scenes).

I did a test of ice vs hugin. 4 images wide, last image had no curvature to it at all, other three did.

ice:

hugin:

hugin has WAY more options. you can decide what points you want to use for comparison between images. Ice doesn't have any of that, really limited. Kinda disappointing as the MS WMV encoder is excellent.

beyond that, images are basically identical. hugin had some errors while reading the files but apparently didn't stop anything. the hugin one let me play with the light in the image, that was nice. ice messed up the images the first time. I switched camera motion & it then worked. hugin got my lost in options at first, you need to select all the images you want to stitch together, then it will stitch them all vs just the first two.

thanks to ice for pointing out that program. ice = uninstall, hugin = stay.

EDIT: ice makes you use the add/remove program dialog to uninstall, hugin doesn't. I like that in a program: give me choices, not hunting down things.

EDIT 2: hugin will apparently do a lot of what I would do by hand in gimp. very nice.

That image is almost ideal for panoramic stitching, background's far off, and no foreground objects at all - I think you'd get a great result with photoshop image stitching alone on that one . If you set some vertical line control points in hugin you'll get rid of the "wavyness" as well.

For complicated things, like indoors and even indoors/outdoors mixed (like halfway out a window), you need a panoramic head on your tripod though - I use a Panosaurus, because it's the only one that doesn't cost a million dollars .

that image should be ideal for panning. that's why I took it. Original stitched images was ~10kx3k pixels in size.

that panosarus looks pretty nice.

At first, thanks iceheart for mentioning Hugin. Its always nice to see/know about alternatives. I'm new to the world of photo stitching so i didn't know any better.

I know its poorly stitched thats because no big effort/advanced knowledge about stitching went into it. I think that its also the outcome of massive distortion because of too short shooting distance. Also i should have used more pictures if i wanted better results.

The amazing thing about ICE is:

-the "just point and shoot" don't think about orientation/overlap/special panorama camera equipment or sequence of the source files.
-the seamless HD Viewer / DeepZoom integration (only Windows though)
-the whole process took 10 minutes for 15 pictures
-its fast because 64bit/multithreaded

It was just a wow experience for me that i wanted to share.

didn't want to start a new thread, but here's a stiched pic of out new house + the property:

Looks like great stitching, but maybe less jpeg compression next time?

I reduced the image width/height by 1/2 but even with jpeg @ 85% quality it was STILL over 1mb in size. So I had to compromise. It was either that or a 70mb PNG.

http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/ice.html

Now available.

Just mount your camera to a tripod, shoot some images of your room or outside and drag them into the ICE.

It will stitch them together nearly perfect. You then select export size...100%...HD View (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_View) and, after installing the HD View plugin (1MB) for Firefox or IE you are blown away.



Really lame 2D render of my PS3 doing its thing:

That's pretty poor stitching TBH, you can achieve MUCH better (essentially seamless) with freeware apps like Hugin (and the autopano and enblend/smartblend hugin uses behind the scenes).

I did a test of ice vs hugin. 4 images wide, last image had no curvature to it at all, other three did.

ice:

hugin:

hugin has WAY more options. you can decide what points you want to use for comparison between images. Ice doesn't have any of that, really limited. Kinda disappointing as the MS WMV encoder is excellent.

beyond that, images are basically identical. hugin had some errors while reading the files but apparently didn't stop anything. the hugin one let me play with the light in the image, that was nice. ice messed up the images the first time. I switched camera motion & it then worked. hugin got my lost in options at first, you need to select all the images you want to stitch together, then it will stitch them all vs just the first two.

thanks to ice for pointing out that program. ice = uninstall, hugin = stay.

EDIT: ice makes you use the add/remove program dialog to uninstall, hugin doesn't. I like that in a program: give me choices, not hunting down things.

EDIT 2: hugin will apparently do a lot of what I would do by hand in gimp. very nice.

That image is almost ideal for panoramic stitching, background's far off, and no foreground objects at all - I think you'd get a great result with photoshop image stitching alone on that one . If you set some vertical line control points in hugin you'll get rid of the "wavyness" as well.

For complicated things, like indoors and even indoors/outdoors mixed (like halfway out a window), you need a panoramic head on your tripod though - I use a Panosaurus, because it's the only one that doesn't cost a million dollars .

that image should be ideal for panning. that's why I took it. Original stitched images was ~10kx3k pixels in size.

that panosarus looks pretty nice.

At first, thanks iceheart for mentioning Hugin. Its always nice to see/know about alternatives. I'm new to the world of photo stitching so i didn't know any better.

I know its poorly stitched thats because no big effort/advanced knowledge about stitching went into it. I think that its also the outcome of massive distortion because of too short shooting distance. Also i should have used more pictures if i wanted better results.

The amazing thing about ICE is:

-the "just point and shoot" don't think about orientation/overlap/special panorama camera equipment or sequence of the source files.
-the seamless HD Viewer / DeepZoom integration (only Windows though)
-the whole process took 10 minutes for 15 pictures
-its fast because 64bit/multithreaded

It was just a wow experience for me that i wanted to share.

didn't want to start a new thread, but here's a stiched pic of out new house + the property:

Looks like great stitching, but maybe less jpeg compression next time?

I reduced the image width/height by 1/2 but even with jpeg @ 85% quality it was STILL over 1mb in size. So I had to compromise. It was either that or a 70mb PNG.