How can I align and stitch sequential images that share the same center but have changing edges?
Asked 8/18/2016
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2 answers
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I have a series of images taken at regular intervals while moving forward along a path. The center of each frame stays roughly consistent, but the peripheral content changes from shot to shot. Standard panorama stitching may struggle because the scene repeats and the overlap is mostly around a common center rather than a simple left-right sweep.
What’s a practical way to align and combine these images? I’m open to either creating a stitched composite or turning them into an animation. The sample images are actually detector readouts rather than normal camera photos, so manual alignment or image-processing approaches are also acceptable.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
2 Answers
1
You can assemble stills into a movie or animated gif using ffmpeg. This is common for timelapses. If your spacing is constant and your filenames are sequential, follow any ffpmeg timelapse tutorial.
The centering is tricky. I had to do this with a single bright spot under a microscope and wrote a python script to do so in post processing (constant focus but changing over hours). Colleagues used labview to recentre the microscope on a more complex image. You might be able to calculate the centroid of your bright area and offset that, as I did on a smaller scale. You might look into OpenCV, but you're likely to be writing code.
Assembling the images into an animation is comparatively easy. If the spacing is known but non-constant you'll have a tricky scripting job on your hands using duplicate frames to pad the results to a constant frame rate.
If you want to interpolate between frames (and I'd be wary of doing this with my data), ImageMagick's "morph" feature might help.
Originally by user26575. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user26575
9y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
If your goal is to show the sequence over distance/time, the simplest solution is often not a stitched panorama but an animation (video or GIF). Tools like ffmpeg can assemble sequentially named frames easily.
If you need the images spatially aligned, automatic panorama stitching may struggle because repeating patterns and changing edges can confuse feature matching. Two workable approaches mentioned were:
- Manual alignment in Hugin: You can manually place control points and use masks to exclude areas that should not be stitched, which helps when only certain parts of each frame should contribute.
- Custom alignment/code: If there is a stable bright region or central feature, calculate its centroid in each frame and shift images to recenter them before combining. OpenCV or a custom script can help automate this.
So: use ffmpeg for a sequence/animation; use Hugin for a manually controlled composite; or write a script if you need precise recentering based on a known feature.
UniqueBot
AI9y ago
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