New version of the stitching panoramas Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE), future features

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    The free stitching of ICE panoramas was updated , about the previous version of which I once wrote . The technological base in this program is very advanced, the quality of the result is high, so the product deserves attention.
    New features and improvements:
    • Improved multithreading support.
    • Support for 16-bit color input and output.
    • A special template for panoramas shot in rows optimizes the preparation of gigapixel panoramas and speeds up the preliminary result.
    • Export panoramas to Photosynth .


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    Export to Photosynth has not been added by chance. Although the panorama is not a synth , it can be conveniently viewed with this tool. On this service, it has long been possible to carry out geo-referencing, which will lead to the fact that not only synths will be on the map , but also simple panoramas. Considering that soon the panoramas will be integrated in the street view mode (I wrote about this here ), this will give the necessary content for display on the maps. Therefore, what I dreamed about here will soon be available in some form in settlements with street view coverage. For reference - the photosynth account provides a space of 20 Gb for posting panoramas and synths.

    An example of a structural panorama. It is claimed that a preliminary result of 300 frames was obtained in 3 seconds:

    6165.ICEStructuredPanos_5F00_12C54ECA

    In addition, there is information about the future capabilities of ICE. In particular, we are talking about stitching panoramas based on footage. The program analyzes the video sequence, selects the overlapping highest quality frames and builds a panorama. A long-standing and very useful feature.

    8524.VideoStitching_5F00_4508D6AF

    It also says about the possibility of improving the quality of the image based on the analysis of the footage. It reminds me very much of super-resolution technology.if so, then this is very cool. Super-resolution allows you to increase the resolution of the picture due to the fact that at the input we have many frames of one object made with a subpixel shift relative to each other. When shooting video, it turns out that way. Those. it’s enough to take a little camcorder around the object and in the end you can generate a sharper image, with details that we have not seen. However, it is possible that we are not going to see what this algorithm is talking about.
    8814.SharpPanoramafromBlurryVideos_5F00_7C4E9C43
    References:
    ICE
    Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) (my note on previous version)
    Photosynth.net
    Super-resolution (wikipedia)
    Photosynth (wikipedia)
    Buttery-Smooth Gigapixel Panoramas
    ICE Is Now Synthy
    TechFest 2010: Next generation Image Image Composite Editor with Multi-Image Fusion technologies

    PS It will be interesting to run a small stitching test on the old and new version of ICE and compare the results with Autopano 2.

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