Sometimes you want to take a photograph of something, like close-up, but the whole scene won’t fit into one photo, and you don’t have a fisheye lens on you. So what to do? Enter the panorama. Now many cameras provide some level of built-in panorama generation. Some will guide you through the process of taking a sequence of photographs that can be stitched into a panorama, off-camera, and others provide panoramic stitching in-situ (I would avoid doing this as it eats battery life). Or you can can take a bunch of photographs of a scene and use a image stitching application such as AutoStitch, or Hugin. For simplicities sake, let’s generate a simple panorama using AutoStitch.

In Oslo, I took a three pictures of a building because obtaining a single photo was not possible.

This is a very simple panorama, with feature points easy to find because of all the features on the buildings. Here is the result:

It’s not perfect, from the perspective of having some barrel distortion, but this could be removed. In fact the AutoStitch does an exceptional job, without having to set 1001 parameters. There are no visible seams, and the photograph seems like it was taken with a fisheye lens. Here is a second example, composed of three photographs taken on the hillside next to Voss, Norway. This panorama has been cropped.

This scene is more problematic, largely because of the fluid nature of some of the objects. There are some things that just aren’t possible to fix in software. The most problematic object is the tree in the centre of the picture. Because tree branches move with the slightest breeze, it is hard to register the leaves between two consecutive shots. In the enlarged segment below, you can see the ghosting effect of the leaves, which almost gives that region in the resulting panorama a blurry effect. So panorama’s containing natural objects that move are more challenging.