AutoStitch raises the bar on iPhone panoramas

I've used the free autostitch (from http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html) - it runs on OS X via Wine/Crossover a lot over the years, and I've used Autopano Pro (which uses autostitch), and the panoramas are impressive. I've done some panoramas with 300+ images (= quite a few gigapixels) and theyv'e come out great. I doubt the iPhone can cope with such large images, but I may well get this and have a go!

The initial version of AutoStitch had some problems with vertical panoramas (witness http://gallery.me.com/bradknowles#100024/IMG_0051&bgcolor=black and http://gallery.me.com/bradknowles#100024/IMG_0053&bgcolor=black ), but I contacted the developers and they were extremely responsive.

This issue is now fixed in version 1.0.0.2, which should be on the iPhone App store soon.

This app is not like Pano or Panorama, both of which force you to use their program to take photos, and help you get the alignment correct for each successive picture in the sequence. This program lets you pick whatever photos you want from your existing library, in whatever order you want, then does the automatic exposure correction, feature extraction, sub-pixel alignment, and then stitching and blending to the final render. You pick the photos, and everything else is automatic from there -- unlike some other panorama stitching programs on the App Store which force you to take each photo, place it on a grid and try to get it aligned manually, etc....

The developers have a lot of good things planned for this program, so keep your eyes peeled. What they have today is already operating at the level of a four-star program, and it's only going to get better from here. They currently rival what you can get with many desktop stitching programs, and I've produced worse panoramas with expensive "professional" stitching programs costing hundreds of dollars. This is a much less expensive program, operating on a device that has much less memory and much slower CPU, and yet it's already doing quite credible panoramas quite quickly with a large number of input pictures.

If you want to take a look at some of the other examples, including examining the source photos as well as the final output, see my gallery at http://gallery.me.com/bradknowles#100024&view=grid&bgcolor=black&sel=9 . The only panorama in this group which was done with any other program is IMG_0052, which was done with "Panorama Pro", and taking pictures very similar to IMG_48, IMG_49, and IMG_50. In contrast, IMG_0084 is what AutoStitch 1.0.0.2 automatically produced, when taking those same three pictures as input.

I snagged it, forever holding out with the inferior apps. It works almost perfectly. I want it not so much for panos but to combine a few shots to get a wider angle photo, essentially giving your iphone a wide angle lens. (for non-moving subjects of course)

nice!

It stitched 25 photos of my patio rendering pano no problem. Straigntened and cropped in iPhoto. Done after dusk so grainy. I'm impressed.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andergm/3621463122/

OK, I downloaded this thing, and the panos it generates are smaller than the original images put together. Is there a max size on the panos?

is this finally taking pictures or stitching pictures with the full 2mpixels (for each picture)? looked at the dev-site an the pics are really not that impressing (compared to pano and panorama)...

Will the software allow you the add more photos to an image - to fill in the blank spots?

Maybe you're just talking iPhone pano software, but it's not the software that's not perfect, it's the person shooting them that's not perfect. Using a real camera and a pano-head on the tripod and you can get perfect panos. I shoot 100+ megapixel panos and you can zoom in as much as you want and you won't see any errors.

Then again, if you're just talking iPhone apps, then ignore the above...