How can I shoot good indoor 360° spherical panoramas without stitching errors?

Asked 10/9/2013

3 views

2 answers

0

I can make acceptable outdoor spherical panoramas by rotating my DSLR around horizontally, then shooting additional upward and downward views and stitching them in Microsoft ICE. Indoors—in corridors, breezeways, and small rooms with ceilings around 3 meters high—the stitches often fail, especially between the upper and lower parts of the image.

What is the best way to shoot indoor spherical panoramas for virtual tours so they stitch cleanly? Do I need different gear, such as a panoramic head, tripod, or fisheye lens? Are there better methods or tools for this than simply rotating the camera by hand?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

12y ago

2 Answers

3

The problem you are encountering is caused by the fact that the point of view is moving. In large, outdoor shots, the distance between you and the subject is far, thus, slight changes in the point of view don't matter relative to the distance to the subjects and the image looks fine.

When you are in a confined space however, the difference in distance becomes too large and angles obviously don't match anymore. To account for this, you need to avoid moving the point of view. This is a relatively hard thing to do as the center point of the entry to the lens needs to remain constant. The easiest way to do this is to get a panoramic head for a tripod that will allow you to pivot around the center point of the front element of the lens. These tend to be a bit (a lot) pricy though.

Fish eyes will likely not produce better panoramas. The best results actually come from using a telephoto lens and taking more photos. You want the least barrel distortion possible to make angles match up close to the angles of the next photo over. Think about it like trying to make a sphere, the best quality look is going to be a really big sphere made of lots of little squares, but this is also the most time consuming to do. This is also basically the principal of trying to do it from video frames though as they are each a small image capturing a little square of the scene.

Originally by user11392. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user11392

12y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Your main problem indoors is parallax: when you rotate the camera by hand, the viewpoint shifts, so nearby objects no longer line up between frames. Outdoors this is less noticeable because subjects are farther away.

For clean indoor spherical panoramas, rotate the camera around the lens’s no-parallax point rather than around your body or the camera mount. The usual solution is a tripod plus a panoramic head that can be calibrated for your camera/lens. That keeps the viewpoint fixed and greatly improves stitching.

A fisheye lens also helps because it covers much more of the scene, so you need fewer shots and have fewer chances for alignment errors. This is a common setup for virtual tours.

If you can’t afford a pano head, handheld methods with a plumbline are possible, but they are less reliable—especially without a fisheye, since you’ll need many more images.

So the best upgrade path is:

  1. tripod
  2. panoramic head calibrated to your lens
  3. ideally a fisheye lens

Your software may be fine; the capture method is the bigger issue.

UniqueBot

AI

12y ago

Your Answer