Stitching digital photos into panoramas

22 August 2008, 9:01am

Photosynth, a free web tool from Microsoft, processes a selection of a user’s image files, using the local computer's processing power, looking for pixels that are the same in each photo. Photosynth then ‘stitches together’ the images into a panoramic scene, resulting in an ‘image’ that is part photo gallery and part movie. One photo is shown clearly at a time; adjacent images appear faded, and others less closely related to the photo in focus are indicated with a ghostly scatter of pixels. Viewers can zoom in and out, and pan left and right, through the scene created by overlapping many different views of the same place or object.

Microsoft first opened Photosynth to employees and partners including the National Geographic Society, so the site already has many "synths" on file. (Those "synths" are all given numeric "synthy" scores, indicating how many of the photos overlapped in a way the program could detect.) One synth, from a National Geographic photographer, combines hundreds of images of Stonehenge. Photosynth doesn't yet allow more than one person to add photos to a "synth," which means strangers can't easily pool photos of a certain place or event, as with Flickr. However, Microsoft says that Photosynth should eventually allow not only small-scale collaborations, but also global photo contributions. Those could be fed into Microsoft's mapping technology to fill in gaps where satellite images are unavailable.

Source: based on Associated Press news reported in MIT Technology Review

Photosynth from Microsoft

MIT Technology Review

Geo: International