Lens Types Supported by REALViZ Stitcher
11mm to 999mm
Any normal (rectilinear) camera lens having a focal length of
11mm to 999mm. A rectilinear lens is one that preserves straight
lines. For example, in a photograph of a building all the lines
that are in reality straight will appear straight in the resulting
photograph.
Flatbed Scanner
Stitcher can also stitch images from a flatbed scanner. In
this case no lens was used but the images are essentially treated
as if they were recorded with a lens having an infinite focal
length. Thus, such images are not transformed or warped, they
are only stitched.
Fisheye
Stitcher was not designed to stitch images captured with a
fisheye lens. The reason is mainly historical. Stitcher was originally
created for the movie industry which primarily uses ordinary lenses,
not fisheye lenses. REALViZ attempted to provide support for fisheye
images but encountered an unfortunate legal problem with another
company who claimed to have a patent on the use of fisheye images.
So for the moment Stitcher does not directly support fisheye images.
However, you can use images captured with a fisheye lens if they
are first converted (i.e. remove the distortion) to an ordinary
rectilinear image. This is not an ideal situation but it does
provide a workaround. For more information on this see Using
Fisheye Images With Stitcher.
Lens Settings
Perhaps the best feature of Stitcher is that in most cases you
do not need to provide any information about the camera or lens
used to create the images! This is in sharp contrast to most stitching
applications that require you to provide the software with lens
properties or manually set control points. Setting control points
manually is extremely tedious when you have a panorama created
with a large number of images.
Stitcher does this by comparing the area of overlap between two
images an finding the best fit with respect to focal length, field
of view, yaw, pitch, roll, and even distortion! So although Stitcher
does allow you to manually specify the lens properties this is
usually not necessary. In fact, you should not attempt to provide
manual settings for your images unless you encounter a problem.
Here is a screen shot of the camera properties window:
Distortion
Although you may be using an ordinary (rectilinear) lens the images
may contain distortion. The is especially a problem with wide-angle
lenses commonly used for panoramic photography. See Why
Lens Distortion is a Problem for more information. Stitcher
now provides a special function for removing distortion found
under the Tools menu:
Procedure
- Load two overlapping images into Stitcher
- Drag each image into the workspace
- Drag one image on top of the other so the two images are roughly
aligned.
- Select the CALIBRATE option under the TOOLS > HIGH DISTORTION
menu.
- Stitcher will attempt to compensate for the distortion in
the images.
Once Stitcher has calculated the distortion you
can save the information for future use. Anytime you want to stitch
a panorama using the same lens you can just load the Camera Profile.
Thus, it is not necessary to repeat the distortion calibration
process each time you start a new project.
There is a limit to the amount of distortion that
Stitcher will remove. For example, the distortion present in a
fisheye image is, in most cases, to severe for Stitcher to correct.
However, there are a variety of tools that are designed to remove
distortion from images include the free PhotoShop plugin called
Panorama Tools. See Using Fisheye
Images With Stitcher for more information. | 
