New update of Microsoft ICE– Cool video to panorama feature

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The latest update to Microsoft ICE – Image Composite Editor is available and it has a feature I’ve been waiting for – being able to create a panoramic stitched images from video…now you can take videos with your cellphone or Flip Video and easily create large seamless images.

Here’s a panoramic stitch I made while in Copenhagen, just selected new video panorama and cropped it…

Copenhagen_stitch

You can also do more interesting panoramas by selecting objects you’d like to appear in the panorama – here are two “motion summaries” of the same sets of images – they give you a different feel of the action.

Dozier Stitch

Dozier2_stitch

new features:

  • Stitching From Video
  • Automatic Vignette Correction
  • Improved Blending
  • and More Smile 

Matt Uyttendaele ICE lead has more details on the new release on his latest blog post.

Microsoft ICE update–video to panorama, lens vignette, improved blending

We are pleased to announce our latest update to Microsoft ICE.  The download is available by following these links:  ICE for 32 bit Windows  -or-  ICE for 64 bit Windows

After installing, you will find some exciting new features.

Stitching From Video

The first is that ICE can now automatically stitch a panorama directly from video.  One fun use of video panoramas is “motion summaries,” like this result that ICE produced:

Ski jump 4

In this video the photographer was panning the camera to follow the motion of the snowboarder.  I used ICE to indicate “Start” and “End” points, and I gave a few hints about which video frames were interesting. The motion tracking and final composition was then done automatically by ICE.  You can access this feature by selecting “New Video Panorama” from the File menu.  This will bring up the Video Panorama dialog (shown to the right), where you can play or single-step through videos in order to choose start and end points. You can also optionally draw regions of interest on individual video frames to ensure that certain elements are present in the final composition. ICE supports most common video formats (avi, mov, wmv, and more).  Of course the results can also be uploaded to Photosynth. Note that this particular feature is only available for ICE running on Windows 7 (for other versions of Windows this menu item will be disabled).

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And More

In addition to the above main features, we have also made a few other enhancements:

    • An options dialog to control scratch disk location and ICE memory use.

    • Enable perspective projection for wide field-of-view panoramas

    • 1/3 less disk usage when stitching large data sets

    • ICE is now more robust to corrupt metadata in source photos

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