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Panoramic Stitching

Overview

Stitching images to create panoramic photos is a very popular application, but existing software packages still fall short of what users want. Applications that attempt to automatically stitch have a high rate of failure, whereas those that yield the best results require a lot of user input. We have developed a new tool that automatically stitches images and videos while producing the results that traditionally required a lot of hand authoring. The user simply selects a group of images from within the Windows Shell and one or more panoramas are automatically generated - it's that simple. Images with different exposures can also be merged to produce high dynamic range images with enhanced detail. Here are a few examples: Castle, Temple, Garden, Mountain

Our stitching software is used in a number of Microsoft Products, including Digital Image Pro, Digital Image Suite, and Windows Live Photo Gallery (Beta).

 

Publications
  • R. Szeliski and H.-Y. Shum. Creating full view panoramic image mosaics and texture-mapped models. Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH'97 Proceedings), pages 251-258, August 1997. (PDF)

  • H.-Y. Shum and R. Szeliski. Construction of panoramic mosaics with global and local alignment. International Journal of Computer Vision, 36(2):101-130, February 2000. Erratum published July 2002, 48(2):151-152.

  • M. Brown, R. Szeliski, and S. Winder. Multi-image matching using multi-scale oriented patches. In IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'2005), volume~I, pages 510-517, San Diego, CA, June 2005. (PDF)

  • M. Uyttendaele, A. Eden, and R. Szeliski. Eliminating ghosting and exposure artifacts in image mosaics. In IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'2001), volume~II, pages 509-516, Kauai, Hawaii, December 2001. (PDF)

  • D. Steedly et al. Efficiently registering video into panoramic mosaics. In Tenth International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2005), pages 1300-1307, Beijing, China, October 2005. (PDF)

  • A. Eden, M. Uyttendaele, and R. Szeliski. Seamless image stitching of scenes with large motions and exposure differences. In IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'2006), volume~3, pages 2498-2505, New York, NY, June 2006. (PDF)

  • R. Szeliski. Image alignment and stitching: A tutorial. Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Computer Vision, 2(1), December 2006. (PDF)