andrel's Journal: Salvation and a full tank in one stop

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PTAssembler

[lucasw]

That panoramic stitching program looks really impressive- a good way to turn a lower resolution digital camera into a much higher one with a little bit of work. I wonder what kind of Free Software is out there for the same sort of thing...

Re:PTAssembler

[andrel]

Panorama tools: http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~dersch/

Resolution is dicated by the pitch size of the pixel array and the diffration limit of the optics. Stitching is to increase the field of view. Although theoretically possible, improving the resolution with algorithmic tricks is very difficult and usually requires low noise, extensive calibration data, and strong prior knowledge about the object being imaged. The buzzwords are "super resolution" and "sub-pixel resolution" if you want to learn more.

Re:PTAssembler

[lucasw]

Thanks for the link, maybe when I pick up a digital camera a few weeks/months from now I'll really start looking into it.

I meant increasing resolution in a literal way - two pictures with 10% of overlap at one edge stitched together would have nearly twice the number of pixels in the corresponding dimension.

Re:PTAssembler

[andrel]

Resolution is a measure of the detail you can resolve, not the number of pixels in an image. The classic Raleigh task is still a good way to think about it: when you see a star in the sky, is it a single star or a binary system? Increasing the number of pixels panorama style won't help you answer that question -- they make the final image bigger but don't add any detail to it. You get more stars in the final image but still don't know which are binary systems. Most cameras ship with gratis proprietary s