Software to stitch 100+ Gigapixel panoramas,

[Ryan Favelle]

Would any of you know any good software (free or otherwise), to put together my small scale trial pano of 8118 photos, (Full scale is hoped to be 70,000-110,000) shot on a 1900mm lens with a crop factor of 1.62 for those interested

Hugin seems to crash on trying to open that many files, and seems to lack an easy way to tell it the positions of each of the photos before aligning when a smaller subset is used (was taken on a computerised mount)

Image composition Editor will begrudgingly handle it, but the export is either limited to less than 65535 in any dimension due to windows .NET limitations, or the adobe output that after 3 days was 1% done, and lacked means to fix a few stitching errors, (Have looked into patching the .NET libraries without much success)

I have 256GB of RAM, and many Terabytes of fast storage, so computational resources are not an issue, only software that will actually deal with it, as this was a 1/10th scale test run before I invest the time in the full scale ones, I'm hoping someone e.g. dealing with night sky mosaics of sky surveys might have a suggestion, or some means of making hugin work for it?

[Monkey]

Well that's ambitious! If you know how the images overlap, one could call cpfind manually on each valid image pair just to get the control points for that pair, then combine all the pairs' control points into one big project file. I think actually using the Hugin GUI might be out of the question - unless you replace the images themselves with 1x1 pixel dummies, and even that might not work - but you might be able to use the command line tools by themselves to optimise and remap the images. How long it would take is another question entirely...

So, 100,000 images with a 1900mm lens... is the end result to be 360x180, with each image covering a little under a square degree?

[David W. Jones]

Hmmm, maybe something here could handle?

https://gigapxtools.com/

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David W. Jones
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[Ryan Favelle]

Monkey, its 0.44x0.67 degree per image, or about 0.3 square degrees. the total image is going to be roughly 180x90 or 270x60, though I will have some margin on the sides, the goal is to exceed 1 Terapixel 

GnomeNomad, Thanks I'll check that out, 

[Monkey]

Gigapxtools looks to be an extremely piece of software. As far as I can see it just splits or tiles images, with no alignment, overlap, or blending.

ryanf, could you upload a few of your test images somewhere? Say, a square of 9, or maybe 25? I'm thinking you might need something more bespoke to achieve your goal, which I'd be interested in helping with, as I'd love to be able to confirm that Multiblend can blend a terapixel image (it should take somewhere on the order of days, and you'll need a few dozen terabytes of storage). The fact that the images are taken with such a long - and, one assumes, extremely good - lens, and with a motorised mount, should make a lot of the usual Hugin workflow redundant and we go straight to playing directly with images.

[Ryan Favelle]

Here is the whole image set so you can pick and choose (may still be uploading for a while), this is 123 rows x 66 columns ordered left to right, the focus was not perfect in all shots, expecially the trees on the right hand side of the bottom few rows, a lens like this has a depth of feild of about 50m at 1km, 

https://ln.sync.com/dl/4d2d48830/fe4ajnhj-6qy45ytu-catktz9g-w6gusyk8

I'm in the process of modifying the mount to be a little more wind resistant to reduce how much it is able to shift, to hopefully cut back the overlap % a little, and making my canon camera play nice with the focuser on the lens, as this batch was manually focused, 

When that is resolved, I'm likely going to try it again, aswell as noting the exact feild of veiw so I can feed it in to the stitching program

[Monkey]

What OS are you using? Are you au fait with using PHP on the command line?

You can definitely cut the overlap back as the images are all well matched for exposure and there's no vignetting. Multiblend doesn't actually need any overlap to blend images, but I'd say 5% minimum to be safe, or 10% to be a good balance between blending and number of images needed.

[Ryan Favelle]

Windows 10, not familiar with PHP, but can probably work it out if needed, 

The high overlap % was to deal with wind, the mount I shot it all on was a big flimsy when 25Kmph gusts showed up, 

[Monkey]

Okay, I haven't got finished PHP scripts yet but (for me, anyway) it's the way to go.

In preparation, can you download the top zip file from here: https://windows.php.net/download#php-8.0

Extract the contents to C:\php (or any other folder, doesn't have to be on C: and doesn't have to be the same drive as your photos)

Add C:\php (or your chosen path) to your "Path" Environment variable (Right click My Computer, go to Advanced System Settings, click Environment Variables button. Or search "Environment Variables" in Settings)

Open a command line prompt and type php --version [ENTER] to confirm it's working.

If you haven't got one already, I'd recommend setting up a project folder, with a "Photos" folder in it containing the full set of photos. PHP scripts will go in the project folder.

[Monkey]

https://i.imgur.com/RPTbrDs.png

This image shows a rough analysis of the image set. A red line indicates that cpfind was not able to find sensible control points between images. The coloured areas show the largest fully connected areas which should stitch reasonably well, assuming the remaining control points are actually good. As you can see, the sea and the sky are going to be a problem...