Panoramic Photos with Autostitch
I did two things this Sunday. I went on my first bike ride this year with my new mountain bike, and got the chance to try out some panoramic photography. The ride was cold at 7°C so I had to bundle up. I rode along lakeshore and was able to see the Toronto skyline. Although it was a bit foggy I wanted to try and make a panoramic photo of it anyway.
After getting home I ended up with a set of photos that are not even remotely aligned.
I searched around the net and I found Autostitch.
This little standalone application is able to take the most crappy photos, like the ones I took, and stitch tem together automatically without any user input and make something like this:
EDIT: Here is a more recent photo taken the same way when it was a little more sunny out.
I would say that is quite impressive. Of course better quality photos make better quality panoramas. I was so impressed that I decided to use it as the banner at the top of this blog.  I think I may go back to the spot when the weather is nicer and snap a (hopefully) much nicer photo.
The neat thing about it is that you can do this with practically any camera. You could theoretically even do it with scanned in images.
This ingenious little program appears to be freeware. You can download the program at http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html.
Usage
After downloading simply unzip the contents and run the standalone autostitch.exe to get started. No installation necessary! Click FILE –> OPEN:
Then navigate to the folder where your photos are located that you want to stitch together, and select them all by CTRL-A or CTRL-Click each photo that you want to stitch together:
Click OPEN to let it do it’s magic.
After this behold your complete stitched together image! The final image is also saved as pano.jpg in the same directory where you opened your source images from.
If you feel brave, you can adjust quality settings in the EDIT –> OPTIONS menu but you will have to regenerate your photo. Also if you choose higher quality settings and depending on the sizes of the original photos, your final panoramic photo will take longer to generate.
More about Autostitch
Autostitch is a proprietary software tool for creating panoramas.
It was developed by Matthew Brown and David G. Lowe at the Department for Computer Science of University of British Columbia.
The software uses the SIFT- and the RANSAC-Algorithm. This program differs from others such as photostitch in that it automatically stitches together even unaligned or zoomed photographs seamlessly without user input, whereas others often require the user to highlight matching areas for the photographs to merge properly. The only requirement is that all photographs be taken from a single point.
Roberto Sebestyen
