Stitch Away!

Followed a link from Alan Levine's excellent new media blog (CogDogBlog) and found Autostitch. It's an amazing 2D automatic image stitching utility - 2D as in vertical and horizontal panoramas - and comes out of the AI lab at the University of British Columbia. It produces a seamless panorama from even the most casually captured images. It even manages to smooth out the shifting presence of moving people, cars, etc.

Autostitch created the above panorama from an impromptu photoshoot outside my office door on the Tulane campus. The final result is still a bit rough, but with a modicum of forethought while you shoot, you could esily achieve a full, unblemished panorama.

There's a free downloadable demo on the site. They call it a demo, but it's capable of doing just about everything I want in a panorama stitcher. If you want more, the technology has been licensed and included in a number of commercial products, all referenced on the site.

If you do a search on the tag "Autostitch" on Flickr, you'll turn up some wild images, including this particulalry spectacular "failure."