G14-Final-Report
PRESENTING RESULTS FOR GROUP 14 - A Day with Petko, Jay, and Imran
Group Members : Petko, Jay, Imran
Petko
- Photography of bedroom & lounge room.
- Tripod procurement.
- Software Burning.
- Autostitching.
- PhotoMontage application.
- Final panorama of Pool Shot.
Jay
- Project idea.
- Photography of Pool Shot.
- Photoshop manipulations and touchups (all pictures).
- Autostitching.
- PhotoMontage attempts.
- Final panorama of Bedroom.
- Final Template Design.
Imran
- Autostitching.
- PhotoMontage attempts.
- Final panorama of Lounge room.
- Partial Matlab code for layering (logical subtraction).
Final Results ( PREFER SIZES of about 800x600 )
What IMAGES were used ( PREFER SIZES of about 400x300)
This is a clean stitch of one end of the room with an empty chair. In the final panorama, Jay is supposed to be sitting in the chair.
Shots of Jay sitting in the chair were taken at an angle too wide which caused stitching errors as there was not enough overlap. As noticed in this picture, there is a ghost effect.
Through Photoshop, the ghost effect was touched up on and given a slight blur for better blending and realism. This allows both Jay's to be in the same panorama.
An intermediate build of the panorama with the wrong end shots. It was repositioned to reflect the appropriate time change during the day.
Original shot.
Original shot.
Original shot.
This is a stitch attempt where there is a slight height discrepency problem. More images were used to fill in gaps creating a cleaner stitch.
One of the key issues with this panorama with Petko swimming in the pool. Photomontaging was necessary to move Petko up higher in the picture and water filters were applied through Photoshop CS2 to give a ripple effect in the water as he is in the pool of still water.
Here is a compilation with some inconsistencies. The side of the pool has a block of white which needs airbrushing. Also there is a duplicate building in the background which needs to be removed.
Here is a shot of the lounge room window before being tinted. The tint is necessary to give a sunset effect as it is later during the day and matches up with the shadows near the floor giving an evening/night effect.
DESCRIPTION
What were the goals?
- The goal of this project was to build 360 degree panoramas depicting our personal favorite past time places at ONIX over a short period of time (some cases a full day; other cases a few hours).
- We wanted to capture our actions at different time periods in the same setting and get the chance to stitch with different lighting and photomontage ourselves into the appropriate setting as necessary.
How stock footage was captured
Our initial pictures were taken via our personal digital cameras (Konica Minolta DiMAGE G600 [6MP] and Cannon PowerShot SD 200 [3.1 MP]) revolving on a tripod.
Other Material that was used (acquired!)
We did not use other accessories for stock footage. Also no external images besides the ones we took were incorporated into the final panoramas.
Tools used and HOW?
- Microsoft Digital Image Pro was used for stitching together the panoramas.
- Adobe Photoshop CS2 was used for manual editing such as airbrushing up the side of the pool that did not match up, tinting windows in the lounge room for sunset effect, getting rid of the ghost effect and blurring the edges of Jay sitting in the chair for more photorealism, fixing lighting effects in the bedroom, and adding the template.
- HDR Shop was used on the Pool scene to deepen the colors of the clouds and also alleviate the light blue sun reflection on the left part of the pool.
Code or scripting (include as an attachment OR link)
In creation of the final panoramas, considering the sophistication of the available tools, no code was used to manipulate the images; however, Matlab code was written originally with the intention of creating a photomontage effect. The first step for this effect was to do a logical subtraction which is implemented in this code. It takes in 2 jpeg images, breaks them up into Red, Blue, and Green matrices, performs a subtraction on all 3 matrices, and then recombines into a 3D matrix which outputs an image.
The Matlab code can be found here: layer_subtraction.m and a quick demonstration...
It takes in: box1.jpg 
and box2.jpg 
...and then outputs box3.jpg 
What worked?
In general, as the shooting environment was more controlled, it resulted in a cleaner stitch.
Factors behind a controlled environment:
- Balancing the camera on the tripod and shooting pictures in the same vertical angle.
- Being in a closed room where the lighting stays consistent such as taking pictures when the sun is not rising or setting if windows are open.
What was unexpected?
When taking our first series of photos, the camera ran out of battery making it necessary to remove the camera and remount it onto the tripod allowing room for inconsistent height and vertical angle between shots. This brought about issues in stitching causing ghosting effects.
Another factor causing inconsistencies in the first series of shots was the bedroom constantly changing throughout the day. It was not a very controlled environment since parts of the room would get messy during the day as people would come in and go out constantly. The beds would also look different before and after Jay would sit/lie in it.
When stitching pictures of high quantity of pictures (50+) of high resolution, the machines would often run out of memory and not complete the stitch. This required a different approach to stitching.
In the second panorama, a picture of Petko swimming in the pool was taken. What we did not realize till later was that Petko appeared on the bottom end of the pool which did not exist on the other photos causing him to get cut out of the panorama.
What did NOT work?
Having the issue with stitching large number of high resolution pictures required stitching fewer pictures together and saving at lower resolutions. When trying to stitch the intermediate panoramas together, it failed as it could not stitch images of different sizes (inconsistent).
Image Batch was used to resize (shrink) all of the pictures. However after resizing twice, the files were not able to be read by Photoshop which gave an "end of file error" message. This meant that a manual resize of the original image in Photoshop was necessary before a stitch attempt.
Pictures with different lighting generally did not result in a clean stitch. Lighting needs to be consistent between pictures for it to overlap properly.
How would you fix it?
The issue of stitching a large number of high resolution images can be resolved by stitching a large number of lower resolution images together bypassing inconsistent images sizes and memory constraints of the machines.
To fix the batch resizing issue, we would have to either write our own script or find another batch resizer.
Taking pictures in a more controlled environment with consistent lighting results in clean stitches. We realized that after compiling the first panorama and applied it towards the second and third.
Thoughts for the future of this effort?
We would like to simulate a multiplicity effect where a person would be shaking hands, high fiving, or even hugging him/herself in a given setting.
Also, a better future endeavor would be to go into video such as imitating the Kylie Minogue video where there are 4-5 versions of her carrying on a set of actions in a controlled camera setting.
Other details and DOCUMENTATION.
Jay's Bedroom Panorama (in his words):
This was the first one to be completed. It was poorly planned, rushed, and poorly executed. However, it gave us a good idea of what to do better next time and the final result didn't turn out too bad.
Petko and I took these shots 2 hours before my trip to London with Imran. We ran into some technical details with the bedroom shot and sat around for 30 minutes deciding how to place the camera so that we could get a good shot of Gulia (the girl) and maintain a good perspective for the rest of the panorama. During this time we left the camera open and the batteries died. So we charged the camera for 15 minutes only to take maybe one eight of the room before rinsing and repeating. We quickly ran out of time. Additionally, when removing the battery from the camera the tripod slipped and we lost our angle and height. This presented problems when trying to stitch the images that contain me taking my shirt off, the chair, and the bulletin board among other places. Luckily we shot about 110 images of a really small room. I had a lot of selection for the stitching process including choices on lighting. We had originally shot half the room with the window open before considering that it might be overpowering and interfere for the shots in front of the window. We closed it all the way and re-shot the entire room. I was unable to stitch the dark shots to my satisfaction until Imran tried to drag all 110 images into the stitching program. We noticed the shots with the light stitched better. Originally the end points of the panorama were going to be the shot of the blackboard chair and removing my shirt (the area we had the most trouble stitching). I then tinkered with a combination of light and dark shots. This also lent to the illusion of time passing as the lighting rises and falls like the sunlight would have over the course of a day. However, finding the right combination took hours upon hours. 6 mega pixel images complicated things (we should have batch resized but again, it was the first attempt). In some cases, I tried to crop images to get the perfect overlap. Sometimes I had more than 33 percent overlap and I could tell it was nearly perfect but the algorithms of stitching program could not detect it. The program was annoying in that it always did almost what I wanted but did not produce exact results. I just kept tweaking it and tried to apply techniques to make it stitch better. The manual positioning added a lot of variability. Sometimes the program would stitch an area successfully and then mess up the same area consistently in the next 10 attempts. It was a tedious process. There are some near misses in the near misses folder. Due to the problems on stitching and the computer hours involved, I worked on 2 computers when possible. My files were erased off one of the public computers.
Another main problem was the shot of me on the laptop. The angle was too wide to prevent overlap with the shot of myself on the bed. Unfortunately I couldn’t be in two places at once. This led to ghosting in the stitching process. I tried to use photomontage to fix this but it was not going according to plan. Instead, I used Photoshop to fix the problem. I did this by choosing the bed shot with overlap of the empty computer area. I opened another window, magic lassoed my self in a way that I would match up and copy pasted the occupied computer shot into its respective place in the other picture. I then Gaussian blurred my body a couple pixels. I wasn’t worried about the blur in the final version because the non-blurred version would be stitched on top of it by Digital Image Studio later.
One minor problem was the location. We shot the scene in an area where people live. It was constantly in flux as someone didn’t clean his side of the room. As such, we kept moving trash and rouge belongings out of the view of the camera. A close examination of all the images in the photo session reveals different objects on the desk under the wall in different shots.
Other problem areas included the shot with Imran’s bed. In that area of the panorama I’m talking to myself. There are two Jay’s on the same bed. The folds in the bed are very dynamic. We didn’t pay attention to this during the shoot but it seems a though it turned out ok.
Petko’s Pool Panorama
This was the second panorama to be completed. The shots were taken on the roof of ONIX during the day with sunlight. Usually, the light would reflect against the water on the left side of the pool. One major change between the shooting of the first panorama and this was keeping the batteries charged in the camera and keeping the camera on the tripod and rotating it only horizontally. This would leave little room for error when it comes to height and vertical angle consistency between all the shots allowing a clean stitch.
The major problem with this picture was having Petko swimming in the pool. A picture was taken of him swimming in the pool where he appeared at the bottom. The issue at hand was that in the other photos the end of the pool did not exist causing him to get cut out of the panorama. For that reason, photomontage was applied to place Petko into the still water. Water filters were used through Photoshop CS2 where the side of the pool was airbrushed and the water ripple effect tool was applied to show waves behind Petko in the pool. Also with the addition of this picture, as it was not taken on the tripod at the same angle and height as the rest of the pictures, a duplicate building popped up in the background which required Photoshop manipulation to get rid of.
Imran’s Lounge Room Panorama
Going into the final panorama, we did not have an issue with stitch errors. The environment was the most controlled as in the room did not get messy in between shots, the camera was rotated on the tripod where height and vertical angle changes did not occur, and the lighting in the room stayed consistent (no actual sunrise or sunset from outside). The stitch was done cleanly and the windows on the right hand corner of the panorama were tinted with the one on the furthest right being the darkest and the subsequent windows to the left being lighter. This gave a sunset effect as the panorama showed a progression of time.
Links to this Page
- CP 2005 Groups last edited on 25 July 2005 at 6:02 am by 145.Red-81-32-187.pooles.rima-tde.net
- OLD Projects Page last edited on 25 July 2005 at 5:56 am by 145.Red-81-32-187.pooles.rima-tde.net