3. Panoramic Stitching Software

Numerous software packages for stitching panoramas from single images are available. Some vendors of digital cameras provide a software free with the camera. Apple´s QVTR Authoring Studio for the Macintosh or , PictureWork´s Spin Panorama and PhotoVista from LivePicture for the PC are known products. The output of the programs are QTVR movies , JPEG-Files or images in the hierarchical Flashpix format. With PhotoVista a second IVR file, a text file in VRML 2.0 format, is stored for displaying the panorama with a special viewer. IVR is acronym for Imaged-based Virtual Reality. Another interesting variant is VideoBrush Panorama that captures video sequences and converts them into panoramas.

Functions of a stitching software are registration, blending and warping the panorama to a cube, sphere or cylinder. Registration is the process of finding the exact place of overlapping images in a panorama. Taking the information from two overlapping images and combining them together into one seamless image is named blending. Automatic registration and blending can be disabled as well as warping to curved surfaces. This is necessary if photos from a swing-lens camera should be mounted to a 360 degree view. A hotspot is an area in the panorama where a link to another object can be defined. Due to hotspots a walk around in a scene consisting of several panoramas is possible. Usually hotspots must be defined relative to the image size. Authoring tools are available for writing complete scene descriptions.