Stitching a video into a panoramic image

September 29, 2009 8:24 AM

How can I turn a movie taken with a digital point-and-shoot into a photographic panorama?

I have seen demos of software that will do this. From a movie of a scenary, a panoramic shot is digitally created, much like photostitchers like hugin, Autopano, etc create panoramas from series of photographs.

I could extract the frames of the video, and feed them into photo stitching software, but that sounds like a much slower process than I have seen in the demos I described above (where the panorama building was pretty much real-time).

Does anyone know of any software that is out there which does this? It would be awesome if it is open source as well.

posted by TheyCallItPeace to technology (6 answers total)

To partially answer my own question, I found this demo (look at video on the bottom of the page) of software that does pretty much exactly what I am looking for (via MATLAB + Video and Image Processing Blockset). The catch is that it is seems like overkill to use MATLAB + whatever to do this.

Does anyone know of a self contained app that does this?
posted by TheyCallItPeace at 9:30 AM on September 29, 2009

Quicktime Pro can export movie frames to a series of JPEG's.
posted by sonicbloom at 9:46 AM on September 29, 2009

There's VideoOrbits, but I've never used it, and I have no idea what state the project is in.
posted by hades at 10:36 AM on September 29, 2009

VideoOrbits looks really promissing, but from the SourceForge site, it looks like development has stalled in 2006.

Anyone know of any more recent apps?
posted by TheyCallItPeace at 11:36 AM on September 29, 2009

I do not know of any automatic ways to make this happen.

Ive never tried this, but you might be able to automate this using ffmpeg and autopano from the command line.

In any case I used to do this all the time. Here are two ways Ive done it in the past.

Way 1:
Use VirtualDub to export video frames to jpg and then stitch like normal. You may need to play with the decimate setting to cut down on the number of frames you have

Way 2:
You must pan your camera at a very consistent speed to make this work well. Open your video in VirtualDub . Then go to video>filters>add>null>okay. Now click Cropping. Crop the image so that you have a thin vertical strip a few pixels wide. Click okay then okay again. Export the video frames. From the command line browse to your folder of frames. Install ImageMagick Run this command "convert *.jpg +append pano.jpg" Now look at pano.jpg it might work correctly or it might look really weird. You may need to tweak the width of frames that you export from virtual dub.
posted by gregr at 2:36 PM on September 29, 2009

I can't get VideoOrbits to compile, so I gave up on that.

I am using OS X, so instead of VirtualDub I used transcode to extract the frames, and while waiting for DarwinPorts to install autopano I just downloaded and installed hugin, and at least for a test movie I found on the web, it was not as slow as I anticipated -- not realtime, but then again that is not all that important.

I will test it on my own videos and see how it looks later today.

Looks like the DIY was with the individual tools is the way to go ...
posted by TheyCallItPeace at 3:20 PM on September 29, 2009