PanoTools NG:
Re: Gigapixel, handheld...
Trausti Hraunfjord 2009-Dec-11 00:02:34
Very impressive... both the end result, but sure as heck your patience too.
I will leave giga/tera/peta pixel panos to those who have all the time in
the world at their disposal... until we have peta-pixel cameras and puters +
software that can process the images in a couple of minutes.
Looks like it's going to be a long waiting time for me... but just because I
am lazy and won't do big things like this, doesn't mean I don't appreciate
the efforts others put into such projects.
Great work!
Trausti
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Erik Krause <#removed#> wrote:
>
>
> Hello,
>
> A multi viewpoint, three different focal length, handheld spherical
> gigapixel...
>
> I didn't plan to make this one. It was just an experiment, from multiple
> points of view (literally ;-)
>
> Me and my family climbed the Sidelhorn near Grimsel pass in Switzerland
> this summer (the kids had much fun searching for quartz crystals) and I
> had my usual camera rucksack with me - no pano head, no tripod. From the
> summit there was a magnificent view all around, with two of the most
> impressive mountains over 4000m in the Bernese range (Finsteraarhorn and
> Lauteraarhorn), the Matterhorn far in the dust and the Furka Pass, Uri
> granite mountains and the Rhone glacier in the east. And a view down in
> the upper Rhone valley (called Goms), to the Aare glaciers and lakes.
>
> So I took a two row 360° panorama at 50mm from four different viewpoints
> around the summmit in order to avoid having the mandatory cross on the
> summit in the image and to view down in all adjacent valleys. I thought
> of something similar to those "from the tower without the tower" panos.
>
> Because the sky was so nice I took an additional 360° cylindrical from
> the sky just above the mountains at 24mm focal length. I planned to make
> a high res cylindrical of the 50mm and 24mm images.
>
> And because it was so nice I took an additional complete spherical with
> the 16mm fisheye, bracketed -2, 0, +2...
>
> Month later when I was at my parents during autumn holidays I had
> nothing to do, but I had an old 2.4GHz 512MB notebook and the external
> disk with all the images from summer with me. So I set up some PTGui
> projects. It turned out that one exposure step from the fisheye was the
> same as the exposure I took the rectilinear images, and so I got curious
> whether it was possible to stitch the fisheye and the rectilinear images
> together and how far I would get with this tiny machine.
>
> For ease of use I converted all images from raw to jpeg but with full
> resolution (20MP) and maximum dynamic range. To my suprise it was
> possible to load all 82 images into PTGui and align them. After some
> playing with blend priority the preview in pano editor looked pretty
> promising. I didn't dare to actually stitch, since PTGui reported that
> 118 GB temp space where needed and the internal hard disk is 20 GB only.
> But now I wanted to make it, on my old machine at home or on a new one
> which I wanted to buy anyway.
>
> When Max Lyons published the first gigapixel in 2003 my computer at home
> was already three years old and I thought I would never ever stitch a
> gigapixel on this machine. Max reported two days of optimizing. Well,
> PTGui took some minutes only to optimize the project on the poor
> notebook and not far longer on my computer at home. It was a challenge
> for my old Athlon 1.4 GHz, 1.5 GB - if it failed, there would be a new
> computer in several weeks...
>
> I optimized all images together. Actually I had to set several control
> points manually between the different focal lengths, but after some
> iterations it optimized well. Then I split the project in three, one for
> each focal length. I stitched the two lower resolution ones to their
> recommended maximum size, and the high resolution one consisting of 62
> images to 46,000x23,000 pixel (maximum would have been 52,000x26,000).
>
> Stitching was ready after 14 hours (I was prepared to cancel the job
> after 36 hours) and delivered a 10 GB .psb file, containing the blended
> panorama and all individual warped images, which I needed to retouch
> huge parallax errors because of multiple viewpoints. So next came
> photoshop - would it open the file? Yes, it would.
>
> It took about 1 hour to load, but working the masks with the brush was
> relatively fast. Flatting the image took more than an hour as well as
> saving the edited .psb.
>
> When all three panoramas where more or less ok, I loaded them all in
> PTGui again in order to blow the lower resolution ones up and take
> advantage of blend priority and the PTGui blender. Processing took about
> 12 hours again. Result was 8GB large (3 layers + blended) and took about
> the same times to open and process in photoshop.
>
> During retouch work I discovered, that PTGui blender did a poor job on
> slight parallax errors in the high res version (structure doubling along
> the seam lines, which I know from ancient PTStitcher feather blending).
> So I decided to give enblend a chance. For this purpose I merged
> non-overlapping images into single layers. 62 layers where reduced to 7
> with the hope to speed up enblend. The -a switch does the same and
> usually speeds up enblend a lot. My assumption was that pre-assembling
> images would speed it up even more.
>
> Enblend 3.2 crashed with an out of memory error, which is possibly the
> documented memory leak in this version. Enblend 3.0 succeeded after one
> night of processing and delivered a nice blended result almost without
> the double structures. I replaced the respective layer with the enblend
> result and could focus on the blending between the different resolutions
> now.
>
> After some adaptive contrast enhancements (large radius USM took about 2
> hours to complete and 1 hour "prepare to filter" on each layer) and hour
> long saving I had no chance to view the full resolution version locally
> on my computer. DevalVR refused with out of memory. I had to scale down
> by half.
>
> Then I started FTP upload to 360cities, which took 7 hours. Next morning
> I had the first view and a shock: There was I white stripe in the pano.
> No, it was not 360cities image processing, it was me.
>
> Searching back through the different versions was pretty tedious - any
> one took ages to load, but finally I found a stripe free version. The
> cause for the stripe must have been a layer copy in photoshop with shift
> key released too soon.
>
> In the 3 hours I had each day there was hardly time to load the .psb, do
> one operation and save again. So it took another week until I had
> re-done the necessary editing and fixed some more stitching errors.
>
> Ah, ok, the URL, finally. Have fun:
> http://www.360cities.net/image/sidelhorn-grimsel-swiss-alps-gigapixel
>
> Who ever finds a stitching error can keep it for better days ;-) There
> surely are a lot more than I fixed. I'm not very satisfied with the
> transition between high and low resolution in some places while in other
> places it looks quite ok - but I hope no casual user will look down
> hires on boring stones...
>
> best regards
> --
> Erik Krause
> http://www.erik-krause.de
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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