Getting the bigger picture

CREATING panoramas from holiday snaps is a fiddly business. But software that hunts through collections of photos, recognises similar images, matches them up and stitches them together could now do the whole job for you. Making panoramas is difficult because sequential pictures taken from different angles do not always fit together exactly, due to small changes in the camera's position and focal length. So before today's software can blend them into a panorama, users must select the pictures manually, put them in sequence and sometimes even align them.

Now Matthew Brown and David Lowe, computer scientists at the University of British Columbia in Canada, have developed a much smarter system. It exploits a mathematical proof that certain geometric relationships between features in a scene are always the same, regardless of the perspective from which they are seen. The new software, which is to be presented at a conference in Nice this week, scans a picture for features such as the corners of a house and calculates the geometrical relationship between them. It then scans other photos taken from the same vantage point for the same relationship.

If it finds a match, the software applies the appropriate mathematical correction to re-orient and re-align the picture. The images are then stitched together and any other differences such as changes in lighting smoothed out. The next step is to create pictures from photographs taken from different vantage points, Brown says. "Once you've got a camera moving around, you're no longer creating panoramas, but 3D models of the world."

Written by Sandrine Ceurstemont New Scientist issue: 18th October 2003

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