Notices

I am not sure how hard this would be, but with the N900 having a "quality" 5 MP Carl Zeiss camera, is there any developer interested in tackling a challenge on making a Panoramic image stitcher? Something that would take a series of photos, like up to 10, using a transparent, overlaid edge to line up the next shot with the previous one, then stitch them together to form a large panoramic image. I would imagine in would work in conjunction with the camera application somehow, so all the image parameter would be set up that way e.g., image size, quality, effects, etc. It could be really cool. Any one out there working on such a program, or be willing to?

Yep it's an interesting topic. Might be better to find some existing software and re-compile that rather than re-writing (though writing it yourself is of course the interesting bit). I'd search for a command link app ideally (no gui = fewer deps and the possibility to integrate it into some other program more easily).

I've just done a quick Google and these things exist, in fact quite a few do, and many are command line apps (as this is a reasonably popular research topic, so there's lots of codes out there)

Yeah - recompile hugin I reckon.

Gui based, but gtk so all is well there, then panotools for the backend.

This of course is easy to say!

On my S60 phone, the camera application does this. You take one pictuture after the other, and they'll all get saved as one large panorama image.

Are we sure yet that the Maemo 5 camera application will not offer this feature? Of course hugin or thelike would still be nice for images that come from a different source then....

No panoramic feature in the N900 camera application. (In general, there are zero to minimal links to any S60 application vs. 'respective' Maemo application.)

But it's definitely a cool idea, especially considering that the N900 takes some nice photos.

thx for this info, ragnar.

hugin, iirc, has a terrible UI. and i'm not talking about "all thumbs" - it's hard to use on the desktop, too. simply too powerful, too many options. it's not fun. not at all.

maybe a dramatically simplified GUI based on the same backend would be better, even if you lose features and settings.

Yes, definitely keeping it simple. iPhone has several of these kind of apps - useful for inspiration and reference.

Pano: http://debaclesoftware.com/
TripStitch: http://byteslice.com/Support/TripStitch
AutoStitch: http://www.technosanity.com/2009/06/...-panorama-app/

It would really need to be as simple as those are...

still, the easiest way for any user to create panorama images is directly from the camera: take a picture, move the cam to the left, take a second picture etc etc.

this process could be further simplified if the cam application takes a new picture without any user interaction as soon as the overlapping area reaches a certain minimum. (i think this is how it's done on my phone, but i cant recall exactly - it's 2 months since i last used it.)

this needn't be included in the stock camera application. it would be OK as a standalone app.

BTW: this is probably the first time in my whole life that i asked for a simplified GUI and less options.

I agree with you! Even though the idea for a stitcher is cool, I cannot imagine being able to do a 'good' job of it on such a tiny screen. Heck, when I bought a 1920x1200 monitor for my desktop to do this, it was like night-and-day for doing this compared to before -- I cannot imagine what it would be like on a tablet.

On this topic, though, it would be nice if there was a stand-alone panoramic *viewer* -- especially one that could handle 'spherical' panoramas!

the iphone apps was exactly what i was thinking. Simple UI, works well with the small, and lesser resolution screen than the n900, and they are all stand alone apps that use the "ok" camera, and I have seen some really nice, well stitched panoramics. Some of the apps can actually stitch up to 15 consecutive images!

Thanks for discussing this. Would be fantastic to have such an application on a high end device like this.