Microsoft ICE Update

A new version of Microsoft ICE is available.
I would have reported earlier about it, but one of my data disks crashed and i had to restore from backup (keep in mind: even a simple backup is better than no backup!)...


Here is a selection of fixes and new features that may draw your special attention as they are putting ICE one more step closer to the group of professional panorama creation tools - and in some respect even beyond:

• Panoramas can be created from video input:
  This is not only useful for people without deep knowledge in panorama making (e.g. you don't have to care about nodal point very much), it also allows to create various flavours of "action panoramas" pretty easy.
  The following panorama was created using this video. The result is here - uploaded without any post-processing:
  

• Automatic de-vignetting. IMHO as good as PTGui and Autopano Giga. Only Hugin would beat that quality-wise (but at high calculation cost).
  ...and:
• More robust to corrupt/mis-matching metadata. In fact, ICE is able to beat Autopano Giga in that respect. Please note, however, that this is absolutely necessary as ICE still doesn't allow any manual intervention if pre-alignment plays havoc...
  One of my favourite "test panoramas" - which was unstitchable without massive manual intervention in Autopano Giga (although APG uses the robot metadata for pre-alignment) - went pretty well within the first attempt in ICE. Only the mast on top of the tower had to be postprocessed in Photoshop:

Öffentliche Probefahrt mit der U2 und ein bisschen Video Editing

Gestern wurde ein Teil der neu gebauten U2-Strecke mit einer öffentlichen Probefahrt vorgestellt. Die Strecke ist in Hochlage errichtet und quert die Donau über eine Hängebrücke.



Wie auch viele andere Wiener habe ich die Gelegenheit genutzt und mir ein Bild von der Strecke gemacht. Rein zufällig ist mir auf der Fahrt aufgefallen daß ich durch das in Fahrtrichtung rückwärtige Fenster freien Blick auf die Strecke habe. Die Gelegenheit habe ich für ein kleines Stereo 3D Video genutzt.



Nun war nur noch das Problem, daß eine Rückwärtsfahrt in 3D nicht gerade magenschonend ist. Also auf zum fröhlichen Video-Editieren! Dummerweise bin ich kein Video-Profi und mir stehen auch keine professionellen Editing-Programme zur Verfügung. Aber mit ein bisschen Suche im Internet kann man sich dennoch helfen:



Schritt 1: Teilen des Stereo-Videos in 2 Einzel-Videos mit Stereo Movie Maker

Schritt 2: Extrahieren des Audio-Tracks aus einem Teilvideo mit Virtual Dub

Schritt 3: Umkehren der beiden Video-Tracks mit Video Time Reversal

Schritt 4: Den linken und rechten Video-Track zu einem Side-Side-Video mit Stereo Movie Maker zusammenfügen. Als Codec habe ich hier Xvid genommen.

Schritt 5: Die unveränderte Audiodatei mit Avidemux zum erstellten Stereo-Movie hinzufügen.



Im Gesamten habe ich auf diese Weise das Video nur einmal decodieren (beim Teilen) und einmal codieren müssen. Die Qualität ist somit weit besser als bei meinen bisherigen bescheidenen Versuchen.

Das einzig störende beim Ergebnis ist ein leichtes Ruckeln beim Video. Ich nehme an, das kommt vom codieren Youtube. Da muß ich wohl nächstes Mal noch ein bisschen an den Parametern herumdrehen...



Hier ist jedenfalls das Ergebnis. 3D-Videos funktionieren im eingebetteten Modus nicht, deshalb als Link:

Bitte rechts unten den "3D"-Menüpunkt beachten. Dort kann man den bevorzugten Betrachtungsmodus einstellen (auch reines 2D).

Microsoft ICE, gigapixel robots and Photosynth united

The new version 1.3.3 of Microsoft ICE has been released last month and there are a lot of interesting features. For panorama photographers most notable are the possibility to...

• ...create a "structured" panorama: This is very helpful if you have captured a panorama with the help of a panorama robot. ICE will pre-align the images, so junctions that are hard to detect will already fit sufficently (e.g. sky images)
• ...upload the panorama to Photosynth: The stitched panorama will be viewable without any size contraints on the Photosynth web page.

How the "structured panorama importer" works:
The new importer stays within the design philosophy of ICE. This means, most of the panorama creation steps are automatic.
The downside: if the detection fails for any reason, there is no way to set control points or adjust the position of single images. However, this isn't such a big problem as ICE's detection engine is working pretty well.

To give you a quick glance, here is the screen of the importer dialog: First, ICE will ask for the images belonging to the panorama. Then, the software will try to auto-guess the shooting order. If you are not content with the arrangment you can optimize the image arrangement yourself.

The importer seems to be optimized for Gigapans but any other robot will also work (i have used a Papywizard/Merlin combination).
After the import dialog, the rest of the panorama detection is done automagically and we will end up with a stitched image like this:

Please note that ICE flattened out all exposure inconsistencies.

This is the sample panorama published to photosynth:

For further reference and download, please visit the Microsoft Research page at
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/
For a peek on further planned features, see
http://windowslive.com/Connect/Post/c5a638dc-e84a-4f0a-81f9-c52f9a047aa3
FAQs, Discussions and Known bugs and issues are available at
http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/112.aspx

Panorama stitcher - the next generation

A new generation of the well known and (in many variations) ubiquitous Panorama Tools Stitcher is available, fittingly called "PTStitcherNG" - created by the author of the original software, Prof. Helmut Dersch.
The new application uses SIMD Maths and can delegate the calculations to a CUDA-capable GPU. My personal tests with a Nvidia GTX 260 (GT200b) revealed a speed increase of up to 24 times compared to the (also very fast) PTGui 8.3.6 stitcher!

The stitcher is still in an early beta state, so don't expect it to be feature-rich. However - integration in PTGui is already working.
PTStitcherNG is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux (x86). The most current version can be downloaded here.

Please note for version 0.4b and Windows Vista/7: At the moment there is a compile problem, so the stitcher will only run in Win95/98 compabitility mode.

Gigapixel speedtest revised

A revised version of the Gigapixel Speedtest is now available!

The new version includes project files for PTGui and Autopano with comparable output size and format, so you can directly compare performance of both stitchers.

Please note that PTGui will perform much better in the new version. The main reason for this speedup is, that i have used the "crop" feature available in newer releases of PTGui. This complies with Autopano which will cut unnecessary image parts automatically.

To give you some figures, i have re-rendered the panorama with the new project on my reference system - meanwhile upgraded from Vista 32bit to Windows 7 64 bit:

• old project on old system:
  2h, 38min
• old project on updated system:
  1h, 24min (speed increase 1.88 - just by using 64bit!)
• new project on updated system:
  57 minutes (speed increase 2,77 compared to old numbers!)

Rich Internet Application Statistics

Click image to view stats at riastats.com

According to the Website, the data was collected by observing ~50.000 unique browser accesses per day - across 42 sites during the past 30 days.
(numbers edited, see comment below)

Microsoft ICE: Stitcher from Microsoft

Power Station Wiestal, captured with Canon Ixus 70, stitched with Microsoft ICE

Microsoft Research has released a free stand-alone panorama stitcher called "Image Composite Editor". It is an automatic panorama stitcher focused towards easy assembly of panoramas for hobbyists and occasional photographers.
To find out more about the features, read the announcement at Microsoft Research

Some interesting features, packed with this software, are worth to point out:

• easy to use panorama editor to align the panorama
• direct output to HDView and Deep Zoom tiles, so you can stitch high resolution panoramas without having to care about file sizes.
  
• Planar stitching modes:
  - mode 1: assemble images without warping. Useful for assembling a large image from scanned parts, e.g. a large map.
  - mode 2: rotate, skew and resize images to fit. Useful if you stitch a panorama where the single images are captures from different positions
  - mode 3: stitch large horizontal scenes ("wall panoramas")

Another new version of Slicer

Changes in Version 0.0.4.1:

• Full automatic mode: Slicing, stitching, if applicable - cutting - and HDView creation can be done in full automatic mode. You set the parameters, the rest doesn't need any manual intervention.
• Creation of some helpful batch files for the above tasks. You can start (or repeat) every step by simply clicking the appropriate batch file.

Also, there is a manual available now. It is included in the ZIP-file at http://dativ.at/slicer but you can also access it here for reference.

New version of Slicer uploaded

Changes in version 0.0.3.0

• Bug fixed: Some slice numbers caused program errors
• A single PTGui project can be dragged onto the Slicer icon to start the application with the work file
• Can now create a batch file which converts the sliced panorama parts for HDView
• EXIF date for each image in multiplier is re-read. So all batch-created panoramas will show the correct date.

The file can be downloaded as usual on the Slicer page.

Slicer bugfix

Bug fixed in slicer, thanks to Pedro Silva!
More information and download of version 0.0.2.1 at the Slicer page.

Slicer: Sliced Gigapixel Rendering and PTGui Template Multi-Apply

The new version of the Slicer-App. can now multi-apply a PTGui project as a template for any number of images in a given directory.

The "multiplier"-feature can be used for:
- precision heads: Batch-stitch a days work without having to load every single image set.
- panoramic movies: Create the accompanying project files for your panoramic movie frames.

Download and usage instructions can be found here.

Sliced Gigapixel Panorama Rendering: "Slicer"

One of the most annoying problems in gigapixel imaging is the fact that most image formats can't handle large files. Some proprietary (like Photoshop PSB) or rare (like VIPS) can do, but using them will inhibit continous workflow.

In an attempt to circumvent this restriction - and to make rendering faster, i have created a small helper application that will divide a large PTGui/Hugin project into smaller slices.
The rendered panorama slices can be easily post-processed or assembled in your favorite application.

You can download the current version here: http://dativ.at/slicer/

Update 2007/10/17: Microsoft Research has updated its HDMake tool. It can now assemble tiled source images. See this HDView blog entry for more information.

Gigabot Software Update 0.3c

I have made minor changes to the Gigabot software:
- Bug in "reshoot"-mode fixed
- Shorter timings for faster operation

You can download the binary here.
If you want the most recent source code, please don't hesitate to contact me.

HDR Software overview on Panotools Wiki

HDR Software overview on Panotools Wiki

Automatic plugin converter update

Automatic plugin converter update

pano2QTVR

pano2QTVR - a Windows tool to create cubic Quicktime panorama files by Thomas Rauscher

SPi-V Panorama Viewer

Aldo Hoeben has released his SPi-V Panorama Viewer. See some of my sample images here.