I have been in the process of converting my panoramas to ICE and have found it failed on a few occasions. Usually it does very well, but when it goes awry, wow, does it mess up.
Here is my situation: I am using a Canon S5 IS, in stitch mode. I mounted the camera on level tripod using a Panorama head. The camera is level to the horizon. The Panorama head has 12 stops (one every 30 degrees) which provides an overlap of about 30-40 percent on each side of the image. Most (200-300+) images have been run through ICE from this setup with no problem.
I am using ICE 1.2 release 1 built Nov 25 2008 16:39:1 on a Vista 64 bit premium, Quad processor with 6Gb of Ram and 85Gb of free space.
Today, I found a second example that went bad.
When I take any of the images out, the result is fine (does not matter which image I remove). I then took the twelve images and ran them through other panorama tools and had no problems.
Here is the result from using Live Photo Gallery:
I took another set of images a little further down the path 1 minute after the end of this set and it has no problems in ICE.
This is the second set of images that I have had this problem with. Any ideas why this occurs and what to do to resolve it?
Thanks,
David
Boy that's a pretty crazy result. I'm not sure what is happening here - but if you post the images somewhere we can take a look. My guess is that there is no simple resolution. What I imagine is happening is that ICE is finding a connection between a pair of image that shouldn't be connected - in one case our internal threshold detects that using this connection will cause a bad result and in the other it lets it pass.
One somewhat general suggestion to try when ICE fails is outlined in Bryan's answer to the post here: http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/p/2204/3468.aspx#3468 this isn't guaranteed to fix this issue but will decrease the odds of ICE finding bad connections.
Thanks for your reply, I used the suggestion here:
mattu: One somewhat general suggestion to try when ICE fails is outlined in Bryan's answer to the post here: http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/p/2204/3468.aspx#3468 this isn't guaranteed to fix this issue but will decrease the odds of ICE finding bad connections.
and it worked! Upon closer review of the originals in Photoshop, I found that there was actually no part of the image that was not used (i.e. overlap was greater than 50% on all images). Putting a black stripe down the middle seemed to fool it just enough. I suspect I may have used a wide angle adapter to try to get more of the house that was near me in the shot.
Taking that one step further, it occurred to me that if I am using a panorama head and know that my distance between images is the same, could I take the project file from a set that stitched properly and apply it to one that failed? What I did was to create a directory for problem images, I copied a good set of images to the directory and then gave them generic names (i.e. a, b, c, etc.) I stitched this and saved the project.
Next, I deleted the "good images" and copied in a problem set (next set of images with this problem), renamed them accordingly and opened the project set. The result was perfect and it keeps me from having to create black stripes for each image set.
Thanks so much for your help!
Great. I'm happy that this worked
If you get a chance it would be great if you could publish a quick tutorial on how you reused the spj file. I think that many others would find this very useful. Here are some other ICE tutorials to take inspiration from ...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweeperpix/sets/72157608703660071/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/s5700/discuss/72157608146632007/
Sure, a step by step tutorial describing the problem and simple solution can be found here:
http://www.panoramashots.com/posts/ice_alignment_tutorial.pdf
Enjoy!
Thanks David. I just provided a link to your tutorial from our blog: http://hdview.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1AD33AA162CE96C2!1223.entry
The tutorial looks great. One thing that I might suggest is that the .spj is plain text. So a text editor (like notepad) can also be used to create a new spj file for a new set of images - this may be easier for some users than having to rename the image filenames.
Thanks for the feedback.
I did take a look at the .spj file and was able to do the edits, the reason I mentioned just building another set was because when it is a full 360 panorama it starts with the last image and then moves to the first file, when it is a partial it starts with the first image and works toward the last. So the image order for the full set is L, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and the order for one that I have with 6 is A, B, C, D, E, F.
Also, for those not comfortable editing a file, doing the rebuild is pretty quick :-)
I can add a comment about editing the file if you think that would help though,
Let me know,
BTW, I am in the process of updating my site with ICE images, should have the first couple of hundred posted in the next week or so and will be migrating the rest of my current images to ICE over the next few months. I hope that you find a way to keep this product around, there are a lot of opportunities for improvement (most I have seen in postings), but it is a nice easy to use program and that really helps.
I will let you know when my ICE images are ready for public viewing :-)
I'm looking forward to seeing the ICE images on your site. Please do let us know when they go live.