Microsoft Research created a tool called ICE for automatically stitching together many pictures into a panorama / composite. It is no longer available from Microsoft, but here are backed up copies for download:
(And here is a link for the 64 bit download on CNET)
The installation will require that you have “Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013“. If those files are unavailable, then here are copies of them on this site:
I read about ICE in Robert Berdan’s post about creating an enormous print of a leaf, by overlapping hundreds of microscope photographs. Robert’s site is like… a gateway to another dimension. He is a skilled photographer who also goes in-depth on his craft, and it is just fascinating to come along for the ride. Here is a list of his articles (on the left) – go and click any one of them. Go ahead. My site will wait here patiently.
Back to ICE:
It is decent at automatically figuring out how images fit together to create a bigger whole.
You start by loading a bunch of images in and telling the tool how to tile them (in this case, the 2 shots are panoramas of my balcony – the upper part and lower part). You can optionally set the alignment of the pixels using sliders:
Then, the tool combines the images and you can adjust the rotation:
Notice how, in the above image, the pictures’ edges don’t line up neatly. In the next step you get to crop those “hangovers” or “fill them in” with junk that the computer extrapolates. Kind of like an AI hallucination:
The fully stitched image is not perfect, but pretty good for essentially “zero effort”. There are other panorama stitching tools out there, too – Robert links to those in his post.
Related: AutoPano Giga
There is an alternative to ICE called AutoPano Giga – it is abandoned software that you can use with the password on this page.
Related posts from this blog
- Extracting panoramas from old QTVR files
- A day up north – example of how I used the ICE tool to create interactive panoramas
- Google Streetview: how to download pictures, streetview panoramas and photospheres
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