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Pencigraphy: Image Composites from Video

Posted by timothy on from the beats-the-heck-out-of-colorization dept.

jafuser writes: "Prof. Steve Mann (of cyborg fame) has a detailed technical description on his site that demonstrates a method of transforming video into a high resolution composite image. Pictures are seamlessly mosaiced together to form one larger picture of the scene. Portions of the video that were "zoomed in" will result in a much clearer region in the final picture. I wonder if this could be used in a linear sequence to 'restore' old video to higher resolutions? It's on sourceforge; download and play!" Mann has been experimenting with such composites using personal video cameras for years.

1 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Er, but does it *work*? by pla · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Can we say "documentation", people?

    I have three pictures, with roughly 2/3rds overlap.

    I ran them pairwise (1 and 2, then 2 and 3) through estpchirp2m. Good, I get two output sets of 8 reals. I stuff them into a single file, one on each line.

    So I pintegrate that file, using picture #2 as the reference frame. Cool, I now have three sets of eight reals.

    Next, I pchirp2nocrop all three separately, passing the appropriate line from pintegrate on the command line (why bother with text files here, if I need to cut-and-past at this step anyway?). I now have three new .pbm files, which seems like what I should have according to the extremely limited documentation.

    Step four, I cement the three new .pbm's together, and get a single file as the output. "Great!", I think, it worked and didn't give me too many problems.

    So I open up the picture. Or try to. It seems that whatever the output file has in it, valid .pbm data doesn't top that list.

    I tried again, but since I had followed the (limited) directions carefully the first time, my results did not differ.


    So, I have three suggestions for Mr. Cyborg...

    First, it doesn't matter *how* cool of a program you write, if no one can figure out how to use it (WRITE SOME REAL DOCS!!!).

    Second, it doesn't matter how cool your program *sounds*, if it doesn't work.

    Third, 99% of people playing with this will either not want to tweak any of the in-between stages' results. Of those that *do*, 99% will just hack the source. Ditch the four (and then some) programs, and make a single executable that takes as its arguments just the name of the input files, in order, and perhaps a *few* tweaking options (like enable or disable filtering, which sounds useful, except YOU DON'T HAVE IT DESCRIBED ANYWHERE!).


    Ahem.

    Otherwise, great program. No doubt one of the many companies doing the same thing for the past 20 years will soon have their lawyers send their congrats.