Panorama Pandemonium

I like taking panorama photos. My first real experiments with them were on a cheap analog camera without the benefit of a tripod. I'd note what was on the extreme right of the frame, take the shot, pivot extremely carefully until that rightmost object or landmark was on the extreme left of the frame, and take another shot. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Once the photos were developed, I'd scan them in, align them as carefully as possible in an image editing package, and then alpha blend from one to the other across the region of overlap. Pretty crude by today's standards:

(Laughton Glacier, near Skagway, Alaska)

The artifacts from different auto-exposure settings across different photos is pretty apparent.

Still, the technique yielded some nice results:

(View from the Burrard St. Bridge, Vancouver)

Of course, once I went digital, this became much easier because of in-built panorama modes and stitching software. The first one I tried was an HP Photosmart R707, and it yielded pretty good panoramas:

(Cypress Mountain)

Our current camera is a Canon Powershot SD700 IS. Most of the time, its panorama mode and stitching software work well:

(The aptly named Sunset Beach, Vancouver)

And sometimes it fails miserably:


I did some research and discovered that the current software of choice is AutoStitch, developed right here in Vancouver at UBC by Matthew Brown and David Lowe. The algorithm is licensed in several commercial products, but the demo version provided at the website is very serviceable.

I fed it the same input images as the Las Vegas panorama above and got this:


Quite the difference! The software's strength--its no-user-input robust stitching algorithm--is also its weakness. I discovered at least two panoramas that it balked at: one which cropped a distinguishing feature at the very left, and one which produced a very distorted view. I couldn't help feeling that if I had more control over the stitching process I might have been able to get it to work on those panoramas. Perhaps the commercial versions allow you more control.

I'll have to experiment with it some more but at first blush, it's very impressive indeed.