Stitching scanned sections of large format diagrams

I would appreciate some suggestions for stitching together scanned sections of large format diagrams (schematics); photo editors such as Photoshop or the GIMP require a lot of resources, are often sluggish (if you don't have very fast hardware) and require a lot of tedious manipulation to achieve the result. There are photographic panorama stitching tools but these too may have problems with a large number of high-resolution scan sections on slower hardware. Microsoft Photo Editor 3.0 had features that made the task quite simple, but it is difficult to install as a stand-alone app without a version of Office.

What are folks using for a simple solution to this task (other than purchasing an expensive large-format scanner)?

Michael

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I use several programs. Photostitch 3.1 came with my Canon Camera. Not the best, but good enough for my panorama photos. Example:

Find someone with a Canon digital camera and borrow the CD.

More photo stitching software:

Light reading:

I use some specialized panorama software for taking radio coverage photos from the top of towers and rooftops. My favorite of the week is Panorama Factory: ($80). Note that to do any panorama properly, you need an indexed sequencer with a built in 2 axis bubble level. Something like:

I have no idea what you mean by "large" number of "high-resolution" images. Some numbers would be nice.

I've stitched together about 30 images, consisting of 8 megapixel 24 bit BMP images using Panorama Factory without difficulties. The result was something like a 1.5 Gigabyte file size. It also took about an hour on my ancient PIII/1GHz. The latest version supports 64 bit processors, which may work better if your images are truely huge and numerous or possibly hitting a 2GByte file size limit.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
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Jeff Liebermann

Have you used any of them to stitch 1bpp scans of schematics? I found a tutorial for using 'hugin' (opensource) to stitch scans; it is an involved procedure and it worked for me in a test of stitching two

1600dpi 8.5x11 1bpp scans of a schematic, but took twenty minutes on a 700MHz pIII. Since my scanner doesn't have much racking distortion, I can live with simple joins and MS Photoed permits previewed dragging of selected areas with shrinking and expanding, so it would be a quicker solution (it needs a LOT of physical ram however). Can anyone point me to a stand alone installer for it?

Well, a typical 'large' collection for me would be eight 1600dpi 8.5x11

1bpp scans; I imagine that with a simple photo editor, I would work with two at a time.

Sounds faster than what I am getting using 'hugin', whose optimizer only has selections for SSE and number of CPUs; if I can figure out how to get it to 'nudge' the joins instead of blending, I would expect that it would work faster.

Michael

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XaraXtreme4 does a wonderful job with photographs, is really fast and simple to use, I don't see why it wouldn't work with line drawings. There`s a free demo from

formatting link

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Ron

No. The problem is that I have access to a nifty overpriced Canon document scanner and overpriced software that scans directly to PDF. It also has a reader, which makes the resultant text indexable. The problem is that it doesn't have a stitching feature for the schematics. There is software available that will stitch PDF files, but I've never bothered to try any. In the distant past, I did stitch some JPG schematic scans with Irfanview, but the resultant distortion at the seams was deemed unacceptable. Irfanview wasn't really designed to do stitching anyway. No clue on the MS installer.

No. I would work with all 8 images at the same time. Canon PhotoStitch is typical. I line up the images in the order in which I want them stitched. I then define the borders if necessary. Punch "run" and wait a while. My guess(tm) is that Canon PhotoStitch would take about 10 minutes max to do your 8 photos. Panorama factory takes perhaps twice as long, and even slower when I use it to correct for image distortion. However, the results are superior and worth the wait.

Dunno. I don't think that blending is the problem. When I splice two JPG's together, I usually let the program do the blending and straightening. When done, I convert it to 1bpp or more commonly 4bpp to improve the contrast using Irfanview. The conversion is almost instantaneous.

If speed is the major problem, perhaps adding some RAM to your PIII/700 would help. Image editing software, including stitching, does take quite a bit of RAM for array and scratch space. For XP SP3, I suggest 1GB as a minimum.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
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Jeff Liebermann

I use the Paper Port software that came with my Visioneer 4400 scanner to scan and straighten each page, then crop them in paint. Then I use paint to piece them together. A 11" * 17" schematic takes less than five minutes to crop, combine and save on a 633 MHz computer with

256 MB of RAM, and running ME. It was sitting around for a while, not being used, so I cleaned it up and I am building a custom workstation to do graphics work. I can scan and combine two pages in five to ten minutes this way on that old computer.

There are some 'Scan to CAD' programs, but they are out of my budget.

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

For what it's worth. I use Autostich for my photographs. It's really very good. It's freeware, but expires after about 9 months (seems to vary a lot), and has to be re-downloaded and re-installed. However, I haven't really tried it for diagrams.

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Ian
Reply to
Ian Jackson

get

would

Isn't it much easier setting your system clock back a year before opening the app and then resetting the clock, after opening it (lest you forget to reset it)

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N_Cook

In message , N_Cook writes

In one word, "No". There's absolutely no problem having to 'renew' Autostitch once in a blue moon. Once done, it's good for another 6 to 12 months (maybe more).

I said that I hadn't used it for diagrams. I now recall that I did try it once. It did work reasonably well for a first attempt, but didn't persist with it.

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Ian
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Ian Jackson

This must be the key to 'nudging' them together in Paint; how does this software straighten? Automatically?, selectable rotations? Does the rotation appear in real time or do you enter a guestimate value?

I pretty much gave up trying to straighten in Irfanview when the schematic is very cluttered, as it is quite unlikely that I will match details when abutting two images thus straightened and cropped.

'hugin' does a good job but it is a real chore to set up and takes a _long_ time to process.

Do you copy each image to the clipboard and then paste it into the base image in Paint?

I would appreciate reading more details of your procedure.

Michael

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You pick one point and drag the line across to another point, as far apart as possible. I usually straighten on the horizontal, then crop the vertical edges where the two scans overlap. By careful selection, it is seamless.

Paperport also allows you to despeckle a scan with a couple clicks. That will remove the single black dots. The eraser will remove stains and hand written notes, if needed.

Yes. I process each page and save them, then open and rename the first page to the final document name.

Then I open each additional part and line them up in the 400% or 800% zoom. As soon as you line them up, you can save them. No waiting for the software to 'stitch' the segments.

I gave a brief rundown, above. You can practice with a single page scan by cropping it into two overlapping sections, then piece it back together. Feel free to ask more questions, if you need to.

paperport has a decent scan to text converter, for converting parts list, and any instructions into plain text. The photo manipulation tools are easy to use, and have helped me save some pretty bad photos. One of these days I need to buy the full version and see what else it can do.

You can save the document in several different forms, or import them into their file format, which makes it easy to create a complete manual or book.

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

1600DPI is very high resolution. Have you tried 300DPI? That would greatly reduce your image size, file size, & would greatly speed up your editing.
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Bob Larter

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