Hi.,

Does anyone here know of a program, preferably either free or cheap, that can stitch together photos with arbitrary rotation? Canon Photostitch and others of that type require all the images to have a similar orientation, but I want to create a large mosaic from a load of photos that aren't necessarily all pointing the same way even though they overlap.

The photos come, of course, from the air via a model aircraft. My current camera plane has an Ixus 400 with a 1GB CF card in it, triggered by an external radio-controlled shot sequencer. I can take pictures automatically every 4 seconds for about half an hour, and at about 300 meters and up at the normal sort of airspeed they overlap by about 20% or so. What I want to be able to do is fly the thing back and forth in a sort of raster pattern over an area of a square kilometer or so, take all the best, adjacent pictures, and put them together into one huge image.

Sure, I can do it manually with photoshop, but it's a hell of a lot of work. If there is something that will do a lot of it automatically that would help.

Any ideas?

pca

one thing i can think of is you reduce the time between shots to about the minimum that the camera can handle so you get more overlap, then get a script that will crop all pics to squares. Then take the squares and stitch them together

The most technically capable software I have seen is the free Panorama Tools:

http://webuser.fh-furtwangen.de/%7Edersch/

I haven't really used it much, but although it might take quite a bit of effort I am pretty sure that it can be done.

Gareth

My Nikon came with a piece of stitching software that allows you to do tiled stitching.

the GIS department at my place of employment pretty much does everything by hand.
If you cannot ensure accurate rotation, then stitching has to manual. Even satellite imagary needs tweaking like that, with some frames at 90.125 degrees and others at 89.975 the straight lines are never quite right.
It would be pretty inconsistent from a model aircraft in every respect, even Somenzini is not that good.

for those who do not know what some people call a model airplane and now they are flown
Quique Somenzini

Odd shape/layout for a helicopter...

Arbitrary rotation, I think, is the only remaining feature missing from "The Panorama Factory", which is currently the best panorama-creation program I've gotten my hands on so far.

I'm pretty sure it lets you rotate the images in 90-degree increments, just not arbitrarily.