Good day to all. Russell's comments about the scenery in Arizona and Fred Langa's latest newsletter both occurred today - and are vaguely related. Fred tells of a fully functional software demo that will stitch multiple digital photos together to make a large panoramic composite. The sample shown on the website originated as 56 individual photos and looks stunning. From his newsletter: Hi Fred: I recently came across a very impressive technological advance and tool, which can bring panoramic photography within reach of anyone with a digital camera. The tool is called AutoStitch and can be found at http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html Actually, the download is a development prototype demo, not a finished product by any means, but to the extent that I've used it, it works as described on the website. The program automatically discovers and 'stitches' together overlapping photos from a group of photos, and creates a panoramic output file. It can combine photos horizontally and vertically. It requires no installation, and the single executable is quite small (~700kb), considering what it does. The demo has a very simple user interface (except for the options, which can be ignored). It has three basic steps, select the input file group, display the options from the initial calculations, and calculate and produce the output image (pano.jpg in the same directory as the input). It takes only a few minutes to execute on a 300MHz CPU. The options screen is mainly for development, but one option which might be useful controls the output file size. As a test, I stood against one wall of a room and photographed the other three walls in a group of eight photos, four including part of the ceiling and four including part of the floor. The program stitched these photos together seamlessly, and the result had surprisingly little barrel distortion. Check out the web site, but those with a dial-up connection should be prepared to spend a lot of time there - it's mostly all graphics. The Research page provides more technical details, and points to two documentation downloads - a slide presentation and a technical paper, both of which require a degree in advanced mathematics to understand. There seems to be only two major requirements in taking the photos - they must overlap and they must be taken from a single point of view. The process will even work if some of the photos were taken with slightly different zoom settings! I find it all rather amazing, and I'd like to see this functionality included in every digital photo workbench out there. Looking forward to the next issue.--Tom Mighill Wow--- you're right, Tom, this is impressive. This tool lets your PC do what used to take a supercomputer and a roomful of highly-skilled technicians. Amazing! BTW - I've previously quoted material from Fred Langa's excellent newsletter but neglected to provide links. Check it out at & . He has both a free and subscription version of the newsletter available. Hope this is useful to someone. dwayne -- Dwayne Reid Trinity Electronics Systems Ltd Edmonton, AB, CANADA (780) 489-3199 voice (780) 487-6397 fax Celebrating 21 years of Engineering Innovation (1984 - 2005) .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .- `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' Do NOT send unsolicited commercial email to this email address. This message neither grants consent to receive unsolicited commercial email nor is intended to solicit commercial email. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist