NEW Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) 2

[hvbemmel]

I don´t know when it has been released, but ICE has been completely renewed. 

New UI , many new projections, even easier to handle and a lot faster export is what I found in the few stitches I made.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/ice/

[Tucky8]

Thanks Herman, for the information.

I use the ICE very often, it's really a good panoramic image stitcher.

See the download site:

Image Composite Editor
Version            2.0.3
Date Published    25 February 2015

[Sleipnir's Master]

I preffered the old UI but i love the .SRW (samsung raw) stitching. 
The twist flip stretch features are nice too.

[Kevin Childress]

A good topic here, Herman. I was also surprised to see the changes when I updated to the 64-bit version. Unfortunately I am not nearly as impressed with the new release as I was with the older versions. For me, the tool is still going a good job at creating the stitch at the pixel level, but it is doing a horrible job with image quality.  I've provided a couple of examples below.  If anyone has heard of a fix for this I would be glad to hear about it.  

1) Creating Artifacts: Never did I see older versions of MICE create artifacts (for lack of a better description) during the stitch process. I've marked the artifacts below with arrows and ovals. The arrows are pointing to small, rectangular, de-saturated shapes creating during the stitch process. The ovals surround diagonal streaks of moderately de-saturated streaks in the grass. All artifacts seem to reoccur at somewhat regular intervals across the image. The second image is a 1:1 crop of both areas.

2) Exposure Blending and Color Management: I always thought one of the best qualities of MICE was it's ability to blend exposures, and the new ICE claims to have automatic exposure blending. What I find really frustrating about this problem is all of my original exposures (straight from the camera) were matched exposures to begin with. Furthermore, I ensure all exposures have matching exposure value and white balance through my raw conversion. The arrows in this image show panels that seem to occur in the stitch where the exposures in each panel vary from left to right. Additionally, the blues in the sky in each of the lighter panels is way off. 

[hvbemmel]

I left a link to this post in the MS research blog about ICE, perhaps we get an answer.

[Kevin Childress]

I'm trying to post it as well in the ICE forums but waiting on account verification ...

[hvbemmel]

I posted on https://hdview.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/ice-twitter-feed-new-forum-minor-update/#comment-1287

The ICE forum is not directly monitored by the research team, the blog should be. But a German proverb says something like "double sewn holds better".

some more addresses of one of the developers:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mattu/