Trouble report 21
Improper stitch, no overlap
Versions affected
V1.0, V1.1, V1.2.
Description
I have attempted five different panoramas using Pan Factory. Two of them resulted in
good quality panoramas. However, in the three other cases, Pan Factory stitches (one or
more pair of images in each of the three) with only a few degrees of overlap, when there
is 50% overlap in the images.
Workaround
Manually align the image pairs.
See Step 4 -- Fine
tune the stitched image under Making a panorama, step by step
in the help for instructions on correcting the overall alignment. You need to start by
opening the overlap region. You click on its top or bottom edge (see the Stitch command in the
Help).
When the overlap region is very narrow, it can be difficult to click on the top or
bottom edge. You can give the overlap region a little width by stretching one side
or the other. This will make it easier to click on the top or bottom.
Status
Fixed in V1.3.
On some image pairs V1.2 of The Panorama Factory seems to determine that overlapping
just one column of pixels is the best solution.
V1.3 allows setting a minimum overlap percentage. If you typically overlap 25%
for example, setting this parameter to 20% will eliminate the possiblity of The Panorama
Factory choosing a solution with a very small overlap. See Alignment
properties dialog (Tools menu).
The automatic aligner is not perfect. Rather than trying to get it to work
perfectly on all images (an impossible task I think), I settled for making it work well on
most images.
I think that people and computers should each do what they are good at. People
are very good at the kind of pattern matching required for the alignment problem-- much
better (and faster) than computer software (mine at least). Computers are good at
the tedium. So the software should do all the easy image pairs while you do
something else (read the paper, drink coffee, etc.) and you can step in to correct its
mistakes. It is a very hard problem to write software that can do as good a job as
you can at this particular task.
|
