Stitching flat images together

[Mark Johnson]

I need a stitching program which will allow me to stitch together
several hundred successive screen captures which are properly cropped
to remove the browser navigation bars and borders. My application
generates a screen at a time and I need to stitch many such cropped
screenshots together to create one giant Gigabyte sized JPG file or
TIFF file useful for large format printing of the final stitched
file.

Note, this is not the same as stitching multiple shots from a single
focal point camera as most of your PTGui gallery shows. For my needs,
I simply want to bump these "flat" graphics together edge to edge with
no transformations whatsoever. Is this form of simple basic edge-to-
edge stitching possible with PTGui?

- Thanks
- Mark

[John Houghton]

If the images simply butt together in a regular matrix without any
overlap, then you could perhaps use IrfanView, which has a panorama
option to join a row or column of images in this way. Assemble rows
and then the rows in a column.

John

[PTGui Support]

Hi Mark,

PTGui is not ideal for this but if you would like to try please see 6.6:
http://www.ptgui.com/support.html#6_6

Joost

[Mark Johnson]

Thanks John. I did as you suggested and loaded IrfanView. In my
tests, I was able to stitch up enough full color patterened
rectangular scans to create a 14400px tall by 9000px wide mosaic
stitch. However, there seems to be a size limitation much beyond this
as I was not able to achieve my final size of 14400px high by 90000px
wide. So, I'm now at 1/10 of my goal. I guess I'll have to keep
looking for another solution. Thanks again - Mark

> > - Mark- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Mark Johnson]

Thanks Joost. I appreciate your suggestion and read the reference
below. I understand it as I do a lot of 3-d work in other programs,
and this is what I expected. However, I was hoping that there was a
specific command for flat rather than having to approximate an
infinite vantage point using a telephoto zoom to put it together. I
have some rather fine detail that must look good up close so I will
continue my search. PTGui looks like a neat tool though and would be
fun to play with if I have more "free time". Thanks! - Mark

[Bjørn K Nilssen]

On 13 Apr 2010 at 11:55, Mark Johnson wrote:

> Thanks John. I did as you suggested and loaded IrfanView. In my
> tests, I was able to stitch up enough full color patterened
> rectangular scans to create a 14400px tall by 9000px wide mosaic
> stitch. However, there seems to be a size limitation much beyond this
> as I was not able to achieve my final size of 14400px high by 90000px
> wide. So, I'm now at 1/10 of my goal. I guess I'll have to keep
> looking for another solution. Thanks again - Mark

Any reason why you don't use Photoshop?
It will do the job, either automatic (with overlaps) or manual (with no overlaps).

--
Bjørn K Nilssen - http://bknilssen.no - panoramas and 3D

[Bernhard Vogl]

Sure not appropriate for the PTGui list ;-) however you may have a
look at Microsoft ICE.
It has several planar modes:
mode 1: assemble images without warping. - mode 2: rotate, skew and
resize images to fit. - mode 3: stitch large horizontal scenes ("wall
panoramas")
It can be found at
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/

Best regards
Bernhard

[Eric O'Brien]

I haven't tried it, but reportedly Hugin can now do such "flat"
stitching.

<http://hugin.sourceforge.net/>

eo

[John Houghton]

On Apr 14, 12:16 am, Eric O'Brien <eri...@extramonday.com> wrote:
> I haven't tried it, but reportedly Hugin can now do such "flat"  
> stitching.

Perhaps you could provide a more specific reference? I only know of
the 5 year old flat sititching Hugin tutorial by Bruno Posstle, which
uses the shift parameters to position the images instead of yaw, pitch
and roll. You can do exactly the same in PTGui, but since the images
don't overlap, it would probably be necessary to somehow generate a
project file script with incrementing horizontal and vertical shift
values. PTGui's blender would not be able to blend the images, so
either a layered psb file could be output, or maybe nona could do the
stitching.

John

[Eric O'Brien]

In the Images tab in Hugin, there are now "X," "Y" and "Z" parameters, in addition to the usual yaw, pitch, roll.

In a message from April 9, 2010 on the Hugin list (<http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx>) Bruno Postle wrote "...so far I've only used mosaic mode for the 'normal' case of photographing a painting and haven't tried anything else..."

In the current build, none of the automatic control point generators work for me (my computer/processor), so I haven't actually tried to stitch anything "flat" yet with Hugin.

However, if this works as it seems it might, stitching the described screen shots (which have zero overlap) ...should... be possible by the correct (known) X and Y offset for each image.  The original poster used the word "hundreds" of images, so doing this manually would be pretty tiresome.  I imagine that it would be possible somehow to programatically "fill in the blanks" in the pto file.

eo

[Eric O'Brien]

A couple of questions.

1) How have you managed to create the (presumably virtual) Gigapixel
*display* from which you are (it seems like) capturing hundreds of
little portions?

2) What will be the final size of the output piece? What will it be
used for? I ask because I have seen people aim for "300 ppi" for
print even though the final result is destine for a billboard or the
side of a bus or truck. In those cases such high resolution is
entirely wasted because the people viewing the final "print" will be a
considerable distance away.

Just curious!

Thanks,

eo

[John Houghton]

On Apr 15, 12:05 am, Eric O'Brien <eri...@extramonday.com> wrote:
> In the Images tab in Hugin, there are now "X," "Y" and "Z" parameters,  
> in addition to the usual yaw, pitch, roll.

These appear to be Hugin's implementation of a viewpoint correction
feature. I stitched a row of 10 non-overlapping images in PTGui Pro
using incrementing values of VP X and that worked ok, but whether
that's likely to be better or worse than incrementing the lens shift
parameters for a large number of images, I don't know.

John

[Erik Krause]

Am 13.04.2010 08:00, schrieb Mark Johnson:
> Note, this is not the same as stitching multiple shots from a single
> focal point camera as most of your PTGui gallery shows. For my needs,
> I simply want to bump these "flat" graphics together edge to edge with
> no transformations whatsoever. Is this form of simple basic edge-to-
> edge stitching possible with PTGui?

I did something similar some time ago using imagemagick. It has a
specialized command line tool for that purpose called montage.

--
Erik Krause
http://www.erik-krause.de

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