How to create large panoramic images from an onboard camera video.

How to create large panoramic images from onboard camera video.

Introduction:

We will begin with a little background information to preface this tutorial. Think of this as a little history lesson. We think a lot of you are like minded and would enjoy reading a bit of history.

With this tutorial you will be able to make beautiful panoramas from your water rocket videos.

A very large influence on our team and a major reason we got interested in water rockets is due to the fact that we are all huge NASA and ESA fans here at U.S. Water Rockets. We follow every one of their missions with a passion. We also love to imagine what it might be like to work on those missions. Therefore, it should come as no surprise to anyone that we model our organization in ways which emulate the unsung heroes who design these missions, and have inspired us throughout our lives.
We have always had and interest in photography as a separate hobby and career path (for some of our members), and the gorgeous images which our human made remote probes send back have always been a source of inspiration to us. We have been emulating this by putting cameras on our water rockets to capture images of our own area, and every flight reveals something new and exciting. The feeling of discovery must be very similar, but on a much grander scale for the people in the space programs.
When we first started flying cameras, it was long before Google Earth and all of the other satellite images we find so commonplace today existed, so we were discovering our little corner of this planet in very much the same way a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw the first pictures of Earth as seen from space when they launched the first camera on a captured V-2 missile.
Our first grainy images taken with some very primitive cameras were quite similar in many regards, but the technology exists today to help improve images in ways they could only dream of in the 1940's. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and NASA developed their photo stitching methods out of necessity.

The problem facing NASA was (and still is) that their camera technology is generally many years behind the cutting edge commercial technology. The time it takes to qualify a camera for space missions and also the lengthy time it takes to travel to another planet insures that every probe arrives at the destination with "old" or "obsolete" camera technology. You may be shocked to learn that the cameras on the NASA Spirit and Opportunity rovers that have provided us with such stunningly detailed images of the red planet are only 1 megapixel. That's right! That's less resolution than a typical Webcam has as of this writing.
How they managed to get such breathtaking images from a camera that would be considered a 'toy" intrigued us, and we discovered that the trick involved is incredibly simple: you take a lot of low resolution images of small overlapping areas and then use a computer program to blend them together into a single large image with much more detail. You can picture (no pun intended) this by thinking of making a gigapixel image sensor by putting a lot of low resolution sensors side by side in a grid. The idea is the same.
We were fascinated by this technique, and wanted to improve our grainy little pictures using this same method. Initially, there were no commercially available software packages to automate this process, so we had to painstakingly align and blend individual images by hand using an expensive program called "Photoshop". This produced similar results but at great cost in time and effort.
A few years later some commercially available software to merge images the same way NASA does hit the market, but it was very expensive. We continued to hand blend images to make our panoramas. Eventually, we got a taste of true automated stitching with some "crippleware" trial versions of commercial programs, and from then on we were addicted.
By 2007, public awareness of the technique was being raised by the Google Street View applications, which use the same methods to construct their "first person" views. In addition to that, Adobe Systems soon added a feature called "Photomerge" to their Photoshop Software. We began making our own panoramas using the Photomerge software, and it worked amazingly well. This feature could merge images, correct exposures, warp them to proper alignment, and output a beautiful panorama in minutes. We loved it, and discussed our experiences with it on the MSN group we sponsored (before Microsoft closed down the unprofitable group feature of MSN). Hopefully, we have inspired others to emulate us in the same way we were inspired by NASA. and those groundbreaking pioneers at White Sands Missile Range in the 1940's ... ! ;-)
However, we have come to realize that not everyone can justify purchasing a program like Photoshop for this purpose, so we looked around and discovered that in the past few years since Photomerge has been available, numerous new and free alternatives have come out that work just as well and are much easier to use for the average person. This tutorial explains how to create a panoramic view using some free image stitching software which you may already have on your computer and were not even aware of!
So, we are ready to begin the tutorial. Let's get started!