photo program wanted

Hi.,

Does anyone here know of a program, preferably either free or cheap, that can stitch together photos with arbitrary rotation? Canon Photostitch and others of that type require all the images to have a similar orientation, but I want to create a large mosaic from a load of photos that aren't necessarily all pointing the same way even though they overlap.

The photos come, of course, from the air via a model aircraft. My current camera plane has an Ixus 400 with a 1GB CF card in it, triggered by an external radio-controlled shot sequencer. I can take pictures automatically every 4 seconds for about half an hour, and at about 300 meters and up at the normal sort of airspeed they overlap by about 20% or so. What I want to be able to do is fly the thing back and forth in a sort of raster pattern over an area of a square kilometer or so, take all the best, adjacent pictures, and put them together into one huge image.

Sure, I can do it manually with photoshop, but it's a hell of a lot of work. If there is something that will do a lot of it automatically that would help.

Any ideas?

pca

one thing i can think of is you reduce the time between shots to about the minimum that the camera can handle so you get more overlap, then get a script that will crop all pics to squares. Then take the squares and stitch them together

The most technically capable software I have seen is the free Panorama Tools:

http://webuser.fh-furtwangen.de/%7Edersch/

I haven't really used it much, but although it might take quite a bit of effort I am pretty sure that it can be done.

Gareth

Quote:
Sure, I can do it manually with photoshop, but it's a hell of a lot of work. If there is something that will do a lot of it automatically that would help.

Automatic panorama-stitching software does tend to assume that all the shots are taken from roughly the same point. 2D aerial photograph stitching, where you're not at exactly the same height the whole time, and you only get 20% overlap (enough to see both sides of a vertical object in the overlap area), is a much harder problem and I don't think you'll find a faster solution than using manual stitching (and you'll need a good manual stitching program that allows arbitrary 2D transformations between frames). Even Videorbits only does 1D stitching (you can make a linear panorama but not a tiled one) and to do it automatically it needs ~95% overlap.

Peter