Deep Zoom Composer: Check out our Stitching Powers!
August 6th, 2008 | View Comments
One of the things I am involved with on the Expression Blend team a small side-project known as Deep Zoom Composer (DZC). I’ve briefly written about both the composer and Deep Zoom in the past – mostly from a developer perspective, but in this post I’m going to talk about a feature in Deep Zoom Composer that is more general and full of, as the cool people say these days, epic win.
First of all, if you have not downloaded our latest version of Deep Zoom Composer (it’s free after all!), do so by clicking on the link below:
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Download Deep Zoom Composer |
In this release, one of the new features we added is called panoramic stitching! Panoramic stitching is where you take a series of images and seamlessly stitch them together into one single image. Let me show you! A couple of weeks ago, I went back home to Mobile for vacation, and I decided to take some photos of a very popular restaurant in the area:
As you can tell, all of these images were taken in a sequence, and they all have regions that overlap. There are enough variations, though, where simply arranging the images side-by-side won’t result in something that looks nice. To achieve a similar effect, you will need something such as a stitching engine.
Now, I have no idea how to create a stitching engine, but thanks to Microsoft Research, we were able to quickly get their code and integrate it into Deep Zoom Composer. With this functionality, you can import all of these images into Deep Zoom Composer and create a panoramic image very easily.
The following image shows you the final stitched version:
That looks pretty small, so why don’t you take a look at the Deep Zoom version of this instead:
Just for reference, I included the original source images that made up the stitch as well. Notice that the final stitched image isn’t simply an arrangement of the images. The stitcher is pretty clever in what it does behind the scenes. Beyond positioning and rotation, it takes care of blending similar regions together to make the final image look very seamless. You’ll be hard pressed to look at the stitch and figure out where one image ends and the other image even begins.
Because this is a Deep Zoom image, you can zoom in pretty closely to see some of the nicer details that you can’t see when zoomed out. This is one of my favorite pictures because of what it contains. While the restaurant clearly is the focus, if you zoom in and pan towards the right edge of the image, you can see the Mobile skyline as well as the battleship museum:
The city I live in, Spanish Fort, can be reached by simply driving on the road that you see on the left side of the picture (which is actually the same as the road you see on the right side!)
Best of all, you can do all of this yourself. Simply download Deep Zoom Composer, import some images, and stitch them together. There is a nice, short tutorial on how to use stitching here.
Cheers!
Kirupa 
August 7th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Wow dude, this is fantastic! That blending is incredible.
August 7th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Oo also, you should change your permalink urls to prettier ones in WP’s options!
August 7th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Thanks Pasquale – glad you liked it. The funniest ones are where you take a picture where the background is stitchable but the foreground has something like a person in it. In several cases, the person was duplicated (and blurred) while the background was stitched nicely.
How do you change your pemalinks to be prettier?!
August 7th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Choosing_your_permalink_structure
This should do the trick!
August 8th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Very Cool! Very Cool Indeed! I will be sure to get more into Silverlight in the future…
August 11th, 2008 at 10:26 am
awesome
September 20th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
[...] offered for free. The Expression team creates this tool. Kirupa is very involved with it and keeps the community updated. Many of you might know Kirupa from his Flash blog and posts which have helps many people learn [...]
September 21st, 2008 at 10:45 pm
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October 6th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Hi Kirupa,
I’m fun of Deep Zoom Composer and am using it to share my albums with my friends. I have a few on PhotoZoom. What i noticed lately is that i can’t upload more albums. I’m getting either “The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error” or “Unable to compress images to upload. Please remove some images from your composition and try again.
The funny thing about the last message is that i managed to upload quite significant compositions (up to 90 full-size pictures made by 8Mega SLR, 2-3M average), and i’m getting this message for compositions of less than 40 pictures.
So, basically i can;t add new albums anymore.
There is another problem i noticed. When i try to open my old projects, the system loses composition in some cases. I still see the loaded pictures, but when i for to Compose tab i see only part of my composition (if at all). And yes, i save projects before i leave the app.
Your insight into these issues is highly appreciated. I have screenshots, if that’s of any interest to you.
Truly,
Eugene
October 6th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Hi Eugene!
If you try to upload just a single image to PhotoZoom, do you still get the 500 Error?
For the project losing images, that is a known issue that we will need to fix in our upcoming releases.
Glad you liked the application!
Cheers!
Kirupa
October 8th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Hi Kirupa,
Thank you for asking. Just tried to upload just 1 pic – same result. (500) Internal Server Error. Sorry,
October 8th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Hi again,
Additiona info: the album IS created in PhotoZoom under the title I set, but it’s empty. The message when i click on title is: “The photo album is empty. Use the Upload box at the right to add photos to this album.”
Cheers,
Eugene
January 14th, 2009 at 2:19 am
I’m getting an error when I try to export my composition to the Photozoom website, something like “The remote server returned an error:503 Server Unavailable”
Otherwise this is a nice looking product.
January 15th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Hi Ade – sorry about that. We are making a lot of changes to the PhotoZoom Service, so hopefully we will have this fixed really soon
June 24th, 2010 at 12:17 am
Mind if I use some of the information from this post if I provide a link back to your site?