Build Panoramic Photographs With AutoStitch

By Roland Piquepaille

I've recently discovered AutoStitch, an automatic 2D image stitcher, thanks to a reader of Fred Langa's newsletter (read his review). AutoStitch, developed at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, is truly amazing. This has been years since I've been that impressed by a piece of software. It works very simply: you select a collection of pictures and AutoStich analyses their contents and returns you one (or several) panoramic images. You can download AutoStitch for free from this page containing lots of graphics (780 KB) and try it yourself. Once you play with it (no Linux/Mac version yet!), you'll be hooked. Read more...

Before going further, let's see a real example. I took several photos of the Louvre Pyramid in Paris last Sunday. Below are these small pictures.

Small image of the Louvre Pyramid (number 1) Small image of the Louvre Pyramid (number 2) Small image of the Louvre Pyramid (number 3) Small image of the Louvre Pyramid (number 4) Small image of the Louvre Pyramid (number 5) Small image of the Louvre Pyramid (number 6)

After starting AutoStich, I selected these pictures. And below is what I obtained in less than a minute.

Panoramic image of the Louvre Pyramid

Here is a link to a larger version (1,880 x 557 pixels, 142 KB).

I don't know what you think, but I'm extremely impressed. However, I would like to add a warning. If you want to generate the largest possible panorama (Go to the Options panel, and choose to scale to 100%), be prepared to wait, until you got plenty of memory!

For more information, the research work has been published in the Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV2003) under the name "Recognising Panoramas" (PDF format, 8 pages, 820 KB).

If you decide to use AutoStich and are happy with the panoramic photographs it generates for you, please post a comment below with a pointer to your nicest images.

Sources: Various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.


Famous quotes containing the words build and/or photographs:

    “You sold Marmaros to the Russians. Scurried away in the night and left us to die. Is it to be wondered at that you should choose this place to build your house? The masterpiece of construction, built upon the masterpiece of destruction, the masterpiece of murder. The murderer of ten thousand men returns to the place of his crime.”
    —Peter Ruric, and Edgar G. Ulmer. Edgar G. Ulmer. Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi)

    “The charm, one might say the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.”
    —Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)