Gigapan Fisheye |
I am now a beta tester for the Gigapan robotic camera mount. It automates the process of capturing multiple images to assemble into a panorama. My earlier panoaramas were typically composed of 24 pictures and contained about 70 megapixels. Now I am producing panoramas assembled from well nearly 400 images and containing over two billion pixels. My Gigapan ID is GoletaBrian.
Tour my Gigapans on Google Earth.
The next time you visit Google Earth, try clicking on the Gigapan Photos Layer. It's in the Gallery section.
I shot a 360-degree panorama from the center of an Apricot Tree. It is the most panoramic image I have ever assembled. Although the images overlapped at the top, Stitcher did not include the top 1.6 degrees. It reaches 58 degrees below the horizon. The vertical field of view is 157 degrees.
The Stitcher output image file is distorted like a Mercator projection map of the earth. I did a rectangular to polar coordinate conversion in PhotoShop to create a synthetic fisheye view.
Panorama size: 265 megapixels (25518 x 10390 pixels)
Input images: 72 (12 columns by 6 rows)
Field of view: 360.0 degrees wide by 146.6 degrees high (top=88.4, bottom=-58.2)
The field of view is about 290 degrees.
Then I turned the Gigapan on its side, with the axis of rotation horizontal.
Stitcher left out 6.7 degrees around the pole of rotation. The vertical field of view is 111 degrees.
I did a rectangular to polar coordinate conversion in PhotoShop to create a synthetic fisheye view.
The field of view is about 220 degrees. I patched the missing data in the center using one of the images from the panorama. The full resolution image is 8,000 pixels in diameter.
Stitcher 4.2375 occasionally failed with an "invalid allocationsize" message when I tried to stitch together my older 360 panoramas that were not made with the Gigapan. It also failed sometimes wulie stitching larger panoramas taken with the Gigapan, particularly when there was too much overlap at the zenith. I had to remove a row of this panorama to get Stitcher 4.2375 to stitch it.
This is the rectangular projection of the axport file. Both sides have straight vertical edges.
I applied the PhotoShop Rectangular to Polar distortion filter to convert it to a fisheye projection.
Stitcher 4.3510 addressed the issue of the "invalid allocation size" errors. It was able to stitch the same panorama using all of the rows, but it handles the seam of the 360 degree panorama differently than Stitcher 4.2375.
The seam at the left edge now shows pincusion distortion.
Converting the rectangular projection to the fisheye inserts a black gap into the seam.
I keep Stitcher 4.2375 active to stich my fisheye panoramas.