Panorama stitchers, feathering, seaming etc..

[Mike Runge]

That's a really smart idea, Bruno.

With single row panos it is simple to stitch the calculated images 'by hand'
and do the cutting and feathering manually to improve the result. With
multirows it's much more work and sometimes nearly impossible to find the
best method of cutting and feathering. You're idea is not touching only
accurancy  - for my understanding it can obsolte color/brightness correction
as well in some cases (e.g. areas with bright sky passages)!?
 
I think seamless feathering has the potential to improve the quality of the
results very much.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts,
mike
 
On 10/7/2003, "Bruno Postle" <bruno at postle.net> wrote:

>I've been thinking about panorama stitchers, problems with the
>existing PTStitcher feathering technique and ways to make it better.
>
>This is an idea for a stitching/feathering system; I'm not
>suggesting that anyone should run off and write an implementation,
>but it's best to put these ideas in the public domain.
>
>The basic idea is to assign a 'credibility' index to every pixel in
>each source photograph and use this to decide which pixels to render
>when seaming.
>
>The default would be to give 255 credibility to pixels in the centre
>of each photo ranging down to 1 for pixels at the edges - This
>information can be stored in the alpha channel.
>
>When the images are warped, the credibility channel should get
>remapped at the same time as the other RGB channels.
>
>The process of flattening the image would be quite different to the
>normal system of merging layers with alpha channels; taking one
>pixel at a time:
>
>  -  If there is only one layer at that point, then use that pixel
>     value in full.
>
>  -  If there is more than one layer with suitable pixel values,
>     then use the credibility indexes of the overlapping pixels to
>     weight them and merge.
>
>This should give a naïve feathering that will span the entire area of
>overlap, rather than just a specific width.
>
>Some more logic could deal with mismatches between source images
>such as people who move around between shots:
>
>  -  If the pixel values of the layers differ significantly, draw
>     only the pixel with the highest credibility.
>
>--
>Bruno
>
>

-- 
_________________________________________________________              
Mike Runge
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40227 Duesseldorf
	http://www.trozzreaxxion.net
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