Posted by Guy Tal on September 25, 2006 at 4:56 PM
Has anyone here manage to stitch together a large number of images (50+) with any success? I've seen others who claim to have done it but having tried 2 different software packages (AutoPano Pro and PTAssembler) have so far not been successful myself.
Guy
Posted by David Bostedo on September 25, 2006 at 5:30 PM
Guy - I've never done one that large myself, but I've used AutoStitch demo version to do some 10-20 image stitches. I believe AutoStitch claims to be incorporated into AutoPano Pro however, so I'm not sure how much this helps, but.... http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html#FAQ
The example on the site is 57 images in a 2D array, so apparently it's possible. I know that when I've done some, it has an output size feature that will simplify the data coming in (you'll get a small output size as well). So I've used that to quickly get an idea of how well things match up and the output to full size if it will work. Doing 10 different 5 MP images, it took a few minutes to make a small output. It took an hour or so for a full sized output. I'd imagine the memory and time requirements are geometric, though, so it would take a long time to do the full 57 image one.
I can't offer advice, but I'm interested to know what made your attempts unsuccessful. I've done a few very modest stitches with Panaview Image Assembler - I think they have a demo version.
Pete D.
Posted by Guy Tal on September 25, 2006 at 5:47 PM
Both applications ran out of memory. I have 2GB installed and had nothing else running at the same time (other than the usual OS stuff). My project has 60-some 12.7mp images.
Guy
Posted by David Bostedo on September 25, 2006 at 6:10 PM
Would it be possible to do in stages perhaps? Like maybe 4 separate 20 image stitches. Then stitch those 4 together? I'm not sure how the programs use memory, but this could cut down on it. You might also want to note if they are swapping to the drive once memory is maxed. Hard drive swap space could be a problem then.
Posted by Guy Tal on September 25, 2006 at 6:14 PM
David, I tried that. I made 5 horizontal lines, which stitched ok, but then could not stitch the 5 together (same memory issue).
Also, PTAssembler needs to know the FOV and other characteristics which I have no idea how to figure out for the stitched lines.
Yeah, I'd run out of memory with 60+ 12.7 mp images myself, but I'd expect software to be smart enough to not have to load the whole thing at once. PIA does a low res preview, I don't know what happens when you do the "full run" with a collection of files that big. I suppose, in copious spare time, I could try 60 random images and see if the program runs out of memory.
Pete D.
Posted by David Bostedo on September 25, 2006 at 6:32 PM
Guy - If you're trying AutoStich (or possibly AutoPano Pro) this discussion might help :
I haven't kept up with his more recent efforts, but back in 2003 Max had to write a bit of his own code to process this 14x14 matrix of 196 x 6 megapixel images in PTAssembler.
If you can track down the June 2006 issue of Studio Photography magazine, there's a short article in there about Steve Collins' big stitched murals for airports. They're printed 9 feet tall and 50 feet long from 9,000 x 30,000 pixel files montaged from 2,000 x 3,000 pixel Kodak DCS-760 original capture. He's doing the work on a 17" Mac PoweBook G4 using Photoshop CS and a Wacom tablet. He's evidently a machinist and devised and built a perspective control device to line up the camera for the shots. None of this helps you directly but it's a fascinating article with glimpses of what looks like great photos. According to the article you can contact Collins at www.cp19.com if you need more details.
Guy,
I have done about 20 images (vertical) with my pc (2ghz,512M). Results are here
Posted by Garth McElroy on September 26, 2006 at 7:01 AM
Did you try using the PS automerge? I use it for smaller panos but have never tried anything that large. Might be worth a shot.
Posted by Leo Doucet on September 26, 2006 at 8:02 AM
My largest Pano consisted of 21 frames and was taken from an elevated point to the shoreline on the other side of a river. The scene was 4 miles long and it was done in Photoshop CS2 without a problem. Incidently the shots were hand held using a Canon 20D
Posted by Guy Tal on September 26, 2006 at 10:52 AM
Thanks folks! I'll check out the forums mentioned. I also decided to try converting all the TIFFs to 8-bit to cut down on size before stitching. The experiment continues...
Oh, and I checked again - it's more like 80 images rather than 60.
Guy
Posted by Guy Tal on September 26, 2006 at 10:53 AM
Garth - I did try Photomerge and it did work, but the matching was not perfect - lots of duplicate detail and artifacts. I didn't like the results.
it's more like 80 images rather than 60.
>> u mean 80 5D images? My my...that is some spinning.
Posted by Timothy Farrar on September 26, 2006 at 1:48 PM
Guy, Awesome project!
When you do your 8bit conversion (to save space) you will probably have better results if you create a Custom RGB profile that has the same white point and RGB primaries as the color profile you currently use, but set the gamma to 2.5 (this will allocate more tones to the darks to better match our perception of brightness).
Unless you are using a 64bit version of Windows or MacOSX, applications are typically limited to a 2GB to 3GB virtual address space so all pano stitching tools are going to need to do some kind of custom disk caching of their own to handle the data.
Each 5D image saved to 8bits per pixel uncompressed is about 39MB, so you are only going to get 26 images in 1GB, or 53 images in 2GB of ram, and the program is also going to need room to build the stitched image (which could be huge if the program uses 32bit per color channel for internal processing).
My guess is that the stitching program is tring to do everything in its limited 2-3GB address space, and it just does not have enough room regardless of how much memory is on the machine.
Using a 64bit machine with 64bit software might fix the problem.
Since you are allready tring 8bit, best workaround if you cannot get it to work is to reduce the 5D images from 12.7 MP to 3.17 MP to give yourself 1/4 less data to work with.
5D doesn't technically have a full 12.7 MP resolution anyway because of the bayer CMOS grid. So you will probably not loose to much by downsampling. Just be smart in the downsampling method, setup an action to gaussian blur by 0.3 radius (or perhaps 0.2 or 0.1) and use nearest neighbor (instead of bicubic or bilinear) in the resize method --- this will keep the sharpness.
Good luck!
Please keep us posted of your results :)
Posted by Guy Tal on September 26, 2006 at 2:30 PM
Timothy,
I like the idea of profiling/converting the images with a higher gamma along with the 8-bit conversion. I'll give it a try.
Yes, I'm aware of the 2GB process limit too. I was hoping the software was smart enough to do some swapping/caching to disk (I can have it running over night or even a couple of days so speed is not essential) but I guess that's not the case with these 2 packages.
I do know the author of PTAssembler has created some very large images (gigapixel+) but I was told he uses a customized version of the application rather than the commercially available one.
Oh well, experimentation continues. This is not something I plan to do regularly, but just thought I'd give it a try. I'll report back on progress
Guy
Posted by Eric A. Rosen on September 26, 2006 at 3:41 PM
The problem you are having is the limit of 2GB of RAM on the system.. I have 3GB installed and run Panorama Factory for stitiching panoramas.. Before I had 3GB I would run out of memory when stitiching panoramas.. Converting the images to 8bit is going to cause other headaches with regard to the belnding of colors in the stitches.
I have only successfully stitched about 16 shots together from 16bit TIF files. Your solution is to get the max amount of RAM the system will handle, but then again that may not even help out with stitching together 80 images...
Others suggested stitching them in groups and then stitching those groups together. problem with that is the stitching programs want the images to be the all the exact same size and dimensions. I tried this and it would not let me stitch the images together since they were not all the exact same size...
Don't think it is possible to stitch together 80 16bit or 8bit tiff files with the consumer available software...
Posted by Arthur Lund on September 26, 2006 at 8:31 PM
Guy:
You definitely need to go to Max Lyons website previously listed here.
Ask your questions there, and you will talk to people who actually do
very large multiple row panoramas successfully.
Art Lund
Posted by Don Miller on September 27, 2006 at 4:52 PM
I agree there's no reason not to go to 8 bits. I'm sure some of these programs can handle the file size, with the right settings. Photoshop handles addressing beyond 3 gb with it's own memory management. Could you be running out of scratch space (on disk)?
Guy, please let us know what you discover.
Posted by Jim Goldstein on October 3, 2006 at 4:11 AM
Wow I wish I had been reading the forum earlier. I took a break for a short bit. My emails to you earlier dealt with this but I was keeping it on the down low. I didn't realize this was an area of interest to you. I have made panoramics on the order of 50 images plus. Many have been made in relation to my Arctic National Wildlife Refuge trip. I also made one from 50-60 images of Waimea Canyon. Look for my email. I'll try to add more to this thread later in the week when I have more time.
Discussion
22 repliesHas anyone here manage to stitch together a large number of images (50+) with any success? I've seen others who claim to have done it but having tried 2 different software packages (AutoPano Pro and PTAssembler) have so far not been successful myself.
Guy
The example on the site is 57 images in a 2D array, so apparently it's possible. I know that when I've done some, it has an output size feature that will simplify the data coming in (you'll get a small output size as well). So I've used that to quickly get an idea of how well things match up and the output to full size if it will work. Doing 10 different 5 MP images, it took a few minutes to make a small output. It took an hour or so for a full sized output. I'd imagine the memory and time requirements are geometric, though, so it would take a long time to do the full 57 image one.
Pete D.
Both applications ran out of memory. I have 2GB installed and had nothing else running at the same time (other than the usual OS stuff). My project has 60-some 12.7mp images.
Guy
Also, PTAssembler needs to know the FOV and other characteristics which I have no idea how to figure out for the stitched lines.
Guy
Pete D.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/79139841@N00/discuss/72157594194977347/
Just in case you haven't seen Max Lyons work on gigapixel images:
http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/gigapixel.htm
I haven't kept up with his more recent efforts, but back in 2003 Max had to write a bit of his own code to process this 14x14 matrix of 196 x 6 megapixel images in PTAssembler.
I'm looking forward to seeing your masterpiece !
I have done about 20 images (vertical) with my pc (2ghz,512M). Results are
here
Oh, and I checked again - it's more like 80 images rather than 60.
Guy
Guy
>>
When you do your 8bit conversion (to save space) you will probably have better results if you create a Custom RGB profile that has the same white point and RGB primaries as the color profile you currently use, but set the gamma to 2.5 (this will allocate more tones to the darks to better match our perception of brightness).
Unless you are using a 64bit version of Windows or MacOSX, applications are typically limited to a 2GB to 3GB virtual address space so all pano stitching tools are going to need to do some kind of custom disk caching of their own to handle the data.
Each 5D image saved to 8bits per pixel uncompressed is about 39MB, so you are only going to get 26 images in 1GB, or 53 images in 2GB of ram, and the program is also going to need room to build the stitched image (which could be huge if the program uses 32bit per color channel for internal processing).
My guess is that the stitching program is tring to do everything in its limited 2-3GB address space, and it just does not have enough room regardless of how much memory is on the machine.
Using a 64bit machine with 64bit software might fix the problem.
Since you are allready tring 8bit, best workaround if you cannot get it to work is to reduce the 5D images from 12.7 MP to 3.17 MP to give yourself 1/4 less data to work with.
5D doesn't technically have a full 12.7 MP resolution anyway because of the bayer CMOS grid. So you will probably not loose to much by downsampling. Just be smart in the downsampling method, setup an action to gaussian blur by 0.3 radius (or perhaps 0.2 or 0.1) and use nearest neighbor (instead of bicubic or bilinear) in the resize method --- this will keep the sharpness.
Good luck!
Please keep us posted of your results :)
I like the idea of profiling/converting the images with a higher gamma along with the 8-bit conversion. I'll give it a try.
Yes, I'm aware of the 2GB process limit too. I was hoping the software was smart enough to do some swapping/caching to disk (I can have it running over night or even a couple of days so speed is not essential) but I guess that's not the case with these 2 packages.
I do know the author of PTAssembler has created some very large images (gigapixel+) but I was told he uses a customized version of the application rather than the commercially available one.
Oh well, experimentation continues. This is not something I plan to do regularly, but just thought I'd give it a try. I'll report back on progress
Guy
I have only successfully stitched about 16 shots together from 16bit TIF files. Your solution is to get the max amount of RAM the system will handle, but then again that may not even help out with stitching together 80 images...
Others suggested stitching them in groups and then stitching those groups together. problem with that is the stitching programs want the images to be the all the exact same size and dimensions. I tried this and it would not let me stitch the images together since they were not all the exact same size...
Don't think it is possible to stitch together 80 16bit or 8bit tiff files with the consumer available software...
You definitely need to go to Max Lyons website previously listed here.
Ask your questions there, and you will talk to people who actually do
very large multiple row panoramas successfully.
Art Lund
Guy, please let us know what you discover.