How to: photograph and stitch very very very very long scenes
While the state of the art of Panoramic Photography has progressed in incredible ways over the last few years, there is still one type of photography stitching that is still a kind of black art: multi-viewpoint “planar” panoramas. Think of an image of all the facades on a street – while it seems simple to do it, it is still very difficult to create a *seamless* image in this way.
Anyway, there seems to have been some good progress on this front. Here is the project. As usual Rick Szeliski is involved. ;-)
Using this technique, they say, it’s now possible to simply walk down a street and take photos of all the buildings every few tens of meters or so. No tripod, no taking photos every meter and making slits, none of that….
Being an image-stitching junkie myself I know that it’s not actually possible to create a 100% error-free image in this way – it’s simple fact that you’re creating a single image from many perspectives, so there are going to be errors somewhere…
So, here (see the mutant car) is the worst one I could find. This has happened because the plane of the houses might stitch ok, but things in front of that plane, such as cars, when photographed from two perspectives, might not fit together properly, if those two images are being blended together with the car in the seam.
The images are in fact quite amazingly error-free. This is impressive stuff.
Link – Photographing long scenes with multi-viewpoint panoramas
