This is pretty slick stuff.
Matthew Brown is a PhD from University of British Columbia who worked on Microsoft’s photo-stitch software as an intern over 2003/04.
He now applies the experience he gained there with his knack for AI to produce his own impressive ‘Autostitch‘.
The demo is free at this stage (but possibly not for long).
Using it is so simple that there is almost no user interface. Grab your digital camera, walk out outside and spin around clicking off shots at random (50 is a good number to work with).
Then simply start ‘Autostitch’, go to ‘File/Open’, select all your pics (holding ’shift’) and click ‘Open’. About 20 seconds later the software has automatically matched every edge, shape and color and given you back a finished panorama. There are other options that can be adjusted, but the default setting is so slick I wasn’t motivated to change them.
My camera battery was dying, so I only had time to shoot about 20 shots for the test below — ideally it needs about double the data that I gave it — but the effect is still pretty impressive.
In short, if you can imagine yourself working on real estate, tourism or hospitality web sites in the future, this could prove very useful.
April 19th, 2005 at 3:13 am
Really nice effect, does anyone know if this can be done on an apple computer?
April 19th, 2005 at 11:59 am
That’s very cool! I can’t wait to try it out.
April 19th, 2005 at 12:20 pm
That’s simply awesome.
Too bad I don’t have a digital camera…
I wonder if it works with scanned files.
April 19th, 2005 at 1:39 pm
I have used this and did a quick test snapping a load of pics of my office. Simply phenomenal. Great work. Much better results than manual stiching together of photos.
April 19th, 2005 at 8:17 pm
It should operate equally well with scanned images. I talked about using a digital camera with it mainly because I expect that most people will use it that way.
April 19th, 2005 at 8:52 pm
Yeah.
I think that using it with camera pics will be the most common purpose of it, and probably the most fun, in my opinion. =)
Also, to me it’s a pain having to stitch scanned images together in PS. It’s something I’m just not good at, so with this little program, that’s one less headache.
April 20th, 2005 at 9:30 am
Wow this looks great fun - thanks for the link!
April 20th, 2005 at 2:26 pm
Cannot wait until a Mac version comes out. This is beyond the cool factor.
April 20th, 2005 at 6:55 pm
I have the same software for my Mac, but it was distributed by Canon. Does the same thing. Should I give the Japanese credit for this technology? Did M$ steal it?
April 21st, 2005 at 4:21 am
Ok, I was just up for a new camera, Canon, now you have me convinced
April 25th, 2005 at 6:54 am
Very cool Tool !!!
Playtime!!
April 28th, 2005 at 2:21 am
Good to see that us Canadians are putting a dent in cutting in breakthough technology
May 12th, 2005 at 1:44 am
Adobe Photoshop has a stitch feature that is fairly easy to use, and works on PC and Mac.
In order to get the best (i.e. seamless) panoramas, you should consider the image before you take it. Mount your camera on a tripod to control the vertical dosplacement, and be sure to leave plenty of overlap on images to give the software something to work with. You can even purchase a panoramic adapter for your tripod that gives you the correct swivel factor automatically.
Images can be digital or scanned. The software doesn’t know where the image came from.
Hope this helps.
August 21st, 2005 at 7:20 am
I’ve used a tool called 360 Panorama Professional. I was able to just add the photos and it just stitched them and then I could tweak it for Web display. It even created an interactive 360 panorama. I think the company is called 360dof.com
Cheers,