I was recently asked by my work colleagues to take some images of a computer cluster that we had recently procured. Of course I said "Ok" that sounds like a great idea, only the space that I had to take the photos was pretty tight and I had a super wide angle lens to take the images with. I wasn't totally satisfied with the results, lots of distortion, no clear shot of the machine, noise, bad perspectives etc...

I had previously found this post http://www.flickr.com/photos/36383814@N00/4207656698/ which was quite interesting. It seems on of the Hugin devs (I think) wrote some perl scripts called Panotools-Script

So my tools used were ffmpeg, Panotools-Script and Hugin including its dependancies for enblend and enfuse. I tried to install the latest stable version of these tools.

First I obviously took lots of photos, some with a Canon 1000d with a sigma 10-20mm lens, then some more photos with my Panasonic TZ3, I also took a video as perpendicular as I could get of the subject that I wanted to stitch. The video was taken at 30fps and it was about 1m40secs long.

Following the instructions posted at the flickr post http://www.flickr.com/photos/36383814@N00/4207656698/

ffmpeg -i p1050357.mov -r 10 -f image2 foo-%04d.png

The above generated ~1200 image and took about ~5mins. I only extracted 10 frames from each second of video.

match-n-shift -o p1050357.pto -n -v 65 foo-????.png
ptochain -m output.pto.mk  -o output.pto p1050357.pto
make -f output.pto.mk -j 3

The make process took quite some time on my desktop machine so I just worked while it processed the data.

autooptimiser -a -l -s -o output-optimised.pto output.pto
pto2mk -o output-optimised.pto.mk -p output_stitched output-optimised.pto
make -f output-optimised.pto.mk ENBLEND=enfuse

It gave me an aweful lot of errors, I guess it doesn't work too well when I do panoramas up too close! So instead here's a sample I did from a short video clip, the clip was taken with a Panasonic TZ3

Here's the source video P1050396.MOV and the original output in as a tif file output stitched.tif. The final output was a little blurry, it's not the best, but not the worst either.