How can I stitch together many images to provide a 3D immersive experience like Photosynth?

Question

I'd like to create a Photosynth like experience that allows a user to navigate around a virtual environment from a collection of many pictures. For this project I'm limited to using WPF / .NET to create the application. Ideally I'd like a Photosynth component that I could drop in my application - is anything like that available?

Answer 1

The underlying components are all GPL'd, look up Photo Tour from Univ of Washington, and there are similar Open Source libs that do the same thing (some even better than photosynth)

Good luck getting them to work though, they are mostly research heavy, with little to no working GUI's, and most of it is done in C/C++, with TONS of math to figure out.

EDIT: A lot of the algorithms you would need to get started are implemented in the OpenCV project. All in C/C++ though, and like I said before, the MATH can get pretty heavy.

2nd EDIT: "Bundler" Is the current project (born from Photo Tourism project)

You may also be interested in looking at "libmv", another similar open sourced library.

And another one worth looking into is "PixelStruct"

Answer 2

There isn't even an offline viewer, nor a method to "hint" photosynth stitching, so I'd be surprised to see an embeddable component for it (oh, and the site itself seems to advocate the Silverlight client, anyway)

Answer 3

Two packages I have used with mixed success are VisualSFM and Insight3d (followed by CloudCompare, Meshlab, and CMPMVS).

They are obviously processing intensive, and can take time. VisualSFM can use the GPU on an NVidia card, which speeds it up significantly.

Getting a good solution depends heavily on the photos being used. I have used VisualSFM for aerial photo stitching, and so far it has worked best with frame grabs from a video (using avconv).

Both of these use libraries for which the source is available, such as blas, graclus, opencv, cmvs, pmvs and SiftGPU. These libraries contain the functionality you are after, but it is far from a 'drop in' solution.