Automatic panorama and more

brainwash

95
Nikon D40x & A460

Automatic panorama and more

« on: 01 / July / 2008, 08:13:17 »

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At least a camera I saw (Kodak 12x something) had an automatic panoramic mode - you shoot pictures and when you exit the mode it stitches them automatically. Right now on my S2IS it is a pain to hunt for STA..STB..STD inside the pictures folder only to find out at home that on a 4x3 panorama you missed a shot

Then another really interesting piece of software for my Symbian phone is Panoman - it does really automatic seamless stitching, just press the shutter once and keep rotating the 'camera' at an even angular speed, press again to disable it. It really works, don't know yet how.

Another useful feature, perhaps this should be inside the 'digital is' thread, is the one performed by PhotoAcute, which also benefits from a Symbian port. It basically takes a bunch of pictures and provides one single enhanced image from them and claim to offer increased detail/megapixels, reduced noise, coffee and a bagel...
PhotoAcute Studio Example :: Processing the images taken using tripod, with trees swinging in snowstorm, with no PhotoAcute Studio profile for the given camera/lens.

Oh, and I'd still like to see 'D-lightning' done in camera

« Last Edit: 01 / July / 2008, 08:15:10 by brainwash »

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cyril42e

111
SD1000/Ixus70 1.02a

Re: Automatic panorama and more

« Reply #1 on: 01 / July / 2008, 09:43:49 »

Quote from: brainwash on 01 / July / 2008, 08:13:17

At least a camera I saw (Kodak 12x something) had an automatic panoramic mode - you shoot pictures and when you exit the mode it stitches them automatically. Right now on my S2IS it is a pain to hunt for STA..STB..STD inside the pictures folder only to find out at home that on a 4x3 panorama you missed a shot

Could only be useful for preview, as quality stitching takes several minutes on a computer. I think that such features that can be done on your computer usually have low priority, especially when it's difficult to do... But if people wants to do it, they're free

Quote

Then another really interesting piece of software for my Symbian phone is Panoman - it does really automatic seamless stitching, just press the shutter once and keep rotating the 'camera' at an even angular speed, press again to disable it. It really works, don't know yet how.

It probably just takes a few burst shots, and do classic stitching (?).

Quote

Another useful feature, perhaps this should be inside the 'digital is' thread, is the one performed by PhotoAcute, which also benefits from a Symbian port. It basically takes a bunch of pictures and provides one single enhanced image from them and claim to offer increased detail/megapixels, reduced noise, coffee and a bagel...
PhotoAcute Studio Example :: Processing the images taken using tripod, with trees swinging in snowstorm, with no PhotoAcute Studio profile for the given camera/lens.

Very interesting indeed! You can take burst shots at high ISO, and create a single denoised image. Are there open source solutions? Superresolution is interesting too.

Quote

Oh, and I'd still like to see 'D-lightning' done in camera

If there is no advantage to do it in camera rather than on your computer, same remark as for stitching

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brainwash

95
Nikon D40x & A460

Re: Automatic panorama and more

« Reply #2 on: 03 / July / 2008, 09:52:21 »

While I agree with all your remarks let's not forget that CHDK is developed only (for now) for point&shoots. These are mainly gains in usability rather then quality

Panoman really works in realtime, no post-processing, it's hard to believe it until you see it. My camera phone doesn't have a mechanical shutter, otherwise I could figure out whether it takes a lot of pictures or just uses the 'live preview' mode where everything is a moving image.

When given enough time the above features could be implemented as scripts (too slow) or ELF addons. Meanwhile I'll search for open-source real-time alternatives for that, perhaps someone will take the time to look over them or just raise some interest.

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LjL

266
A720IS

Re: Automatic panorama and more

« Reply #3 on: 03 / July / 2008, 10:14:40 »

Quote

It probably just takes a few burst shots, and do classic stitching (?).

I don't know what you mean by classic stitching... I can say the results from Panoman aren't exceedingly good, and it's especially bad if you move the camera vertically. It does claim to do some exposure correction.

Quote

Very interesting indeed! You can take burst shots at high ISO, and create a single denoised image. Are there open source solutions? Superresolution is interesting too.

It's one of several programs that work with stack of images - a popular one here is CombineMZ, mostly used for DOF stacking, but it should have no trouble doing noise reduction by stacking. It's open-source, though Windows-only (works in WINE).

Another very capable open-source tool is ImageJ, which is written in Java and works on both Windows and Linux. It comes with powerful functions to deal with image stacks, although to do depth-of-field stacking as well as image stabilization you need plugins that aren't included - but they're mostly open-source, too.

For just noise reduction, again you can just use the built-in stack averaging function, perhaps with the help of the image stabilizer if you've not shot on a tripod.

For super-resolution, I don't know of an ImageJ plugin... but "the" open-source super-resolution tool is ALE. Be warned that it tends to be, uhm, slightly slow...

For other programs, I suggest looking at this Wikipedia article including the "See also"'s.
Some quick Googling also gave me this page, which has another list.

Note that even though Google can often give you the impression that a program can only do one sort of stack manipulation (DOF, or super-resolution, or, or), more often then not, they can do other kinds, too, as some of the techniques are pretty strictly related.

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brainwash

95
Nikon D40x & A460

Re: Automatic panorama and more

« Reply #4 on: 04 / July / 2008, 08:56:15 »

I've tried ALE and it gives good results even when set on low quality. However it handicapped my computer for half an hour while trying to compose an image from 3 images.
My main gripe with ALE is that the 'official' GUI is not intuitive at all and you have to read through all the provided documentation in order to figure out what you can do and how.

I think the latest camera I saw to automated stitching AFTER taking the shots was Kodak Z810. Usually exposure and focus corrections are not necessary since you must work in AE/AF lock mode. From my experience, if you fail to do that, not even Photoshop or ALE can save you.

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LjL

266
A720IS

Re: Automatic panorama and more

« Reply #5 on: 04 / July / 2008, 09:49:48 »

Perhaps ALE can't, but I'm almost sure I've used stitching software that was quite smart with exposure adjustments etc... even resulting in HDR composites, basically. Which makes sense, theoretically... why would you want to use the same exposure for all images, if they're differently lit?

The software I remember using also made geometric adjustments for barrel distorsion, etc, before stitching (some automatically, some you had to specify your lens parameters). Pity I just don't remember which software I'm thinking about.

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Pauls9

60
S3 IS

Re: Automatic panorama and more

« Reply #6 on: 04 / July / 2008, 10:55:26 »

I've been using Hugin recently. Seems to do a reasonable job in my very limited experience.

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fe50

3139
IXUS50 & 860, SX10 Star WARs-Star RAWs

Re: Automatic panorama and more

« Reply #7 on: 05 / July / 2008, 06:12:32 »

Quote from: Pauls9 on 04 / July / 2008, 10:55:26

I've been using Hugin recently. Seems to do a reasonable job in my very limited experience.

Yeah, for me Hugin is the one with the best results.

The latest (beta) version of Hugin can be found here: panospace - downloads, the latest version is SVN3082 from 24-May-2008, includes latest Enblend/Enfuse, a very nice & complete package !

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