Sampling: What Nyquist Didn't Say, and What to Do About It

AFAIK, there are several software products out there with this sort of ability. I.e., it seems like someone came up with the idea and the *method* was "obvious" to the (different) people who developed these tools. I just am clueless as to the magic involved...

Do you have any "controls" to influence how your camera stitches things together? E.g., I can *elect* to place three (IIRC) markers in "picture 1" and "picture 2" identifying the points that *should* coincide. I've only had to do this once. I think it was a consequence of the camera "re-setting" itself to different (optical) parameters from one photo to the next. I know there are some guidelines that you're (I'm) supposed to use to ensure the adjacent images line up "effortlessly" but I don't really understand optics and the consequences of different f-stops, etc. to know how to relate those guidelines to the underlying "science".

If you want to *create* Zip packages the built-in support on Windows is pretty basic -- the 3rd party packages add a lot more features, that some people find useful.

It's surprising just how many such packages there are (e.g., see

). I purchased a copy of WinAce some years ago now and have been quite happy with it... even if .ACE never did take over the world like I was hoping it would. (It tends to compress noticeably better than Zip...)

Unfortunately Phil Katz drank himself to death at the age of only 37.

---Joel

Ah, I didn't know that. I usually just unzip things (using gzip on my UN*X boxen to *zip* them)

Yeah, I recall ARJ, ACE, ZIP, RAR, etc. Now I see BZ2 and 7Z (?) coming along to further muddy the waters...

And, of course, the StuffIt crowd from the land of apples...

Wow! Pretty young. An acquaintance, here, just passed away. When I inquired into the reason why, I was given the answer "Well, you know he was a 'drunk'..." Guess I'd never considered the health consequences of drinking (since I don't drink). I gather that most "alcohol-related" morbidity is from complications of drinking and not "alcohol toxemia" (?)

I doubt 7Z will catch on. BZ2 likely will in the *NIX world...

Yes, I believe so. Bob Widlar had already become sober and was apparently doing a pretty good job of getting his life back under control when he died while out jogging from a heart attack... it's been suggested that it was all the cumulative damage his drinking had done that made him so susceptible to dying at age 53.

---Joel

I had to unpack *something* with 7Z recently. I know I was annoyed as it was Yet Another Stupid Compressor. Sort of like writing Yet Another RTOS! :>

I can't relate to addictions. I've had lots of

*habits* over the years but none proved to be "addictions" in the sense that I couldn't just walk away from them.

Sad.

Of course, no guarantee that "clean living" won't also find you dead at 53 :-/

I just (3 minutes ago) was commenting (while reading his "Tea Time") about Adams' premature (from *my* viewpoint!) death. Disappointing when you consider the things that *could* have come into the world had things been otherwise (his posthumous "Salmon" is really frustrating as it looks like it could have been another winner)

There have been many different stitching methods. The one used by autostitch is the only automatic one AFAIK, and is widely (though not always visibly) licensed.

I've read a bit about it. It involves feature extraction after the fashion used for object recognition in machine vision, correlation of matching features in the various images, followed by analysis of the lens distortion implied by the measurable curvature in the correlated points. Then some adjustments can be made to the actual exposure levels to reduce discontinuity, and finally a new image is constructed with blending in the overlap region. Straightforward enough technique now, but a lot of work to implement effectively.

I doubt there are competitive implementations anywhere, but perhaps there are some inferior ones.

Autostitch has a number of tweakable options in how loosely the features must match to be considered matching, and things like that, but no capability (nor need! as older techniques did) of requiring the user to manually identify features.

You should set your camera to "Exposure lock", and take the first frame at a part of the scene with median lighting.

Clifford Heath.

Some interesting links worth reviewing related to Autostitch:

Jon

That would be scribus - it is, AFAIK, /the/ open source DTP program. I have barely tried it myself, but it is apparently very popular. And as with many such tools, it is cross-platform - try it with Linux, Windows or MacOS as you will.

I find it even more surprising how many people /pay/ for packages like this - when there is free software such as 7zip that does everything you need.

I also find it depressing how many people abuse WinZip and WinRAR by using them without paying for them. Shareware is commercial software sold for money - it is free to test and try out, but people should either pay for it (as you did for WinAce), or use something else.

And I find it depressing how companies can take other people's hard work, put a pretty face on it, call it there own and sell it. That's what WinZip did - the guts of the program were originally InfoZip's BSD-licensed zip libraries. I know that this is perfectly legal under the BSD, but I still feel something is morally wrong somewhere.

Dunno. I first stumbled on the "tool" at a client's shop. Only needed it for one photo so never thought much more about it.

Some time later, needed to do something similar so bought a copy of it figuring it *might* work for me -- assumed the ease of my first success with it was just a pleasant coincidence. Figured it would probably take "a bit of work" to make regular use of it but considered the potential gain as well worth the effort (e.g., NOT having to use wide-angle lenses, 360 views, etc.).

So, when I subsequently found it to be literally a "no-brainer" to use *regardless* (almost) of the "input" photos, I was really blown away. BFM without a doubt!

I've since found several cases where it was unable to stitch things together without significant visual artifacts. But, in each case, I almost *knew* I was going to have a problem *while* I was taking the photos (but couldn't articulate "why" since I didn't understand what the algorithm was doing).

Now, it's as if I go *looking* for opportunities to use it! :>

Hmmm... I had assumed it was just trying to convolve the DCT's from the individual images looking for a peak or a null. But, that was just an ignorant guess as to how the magic might work. Anything else that I could think of seemed like it would use more resources than this apparently was using.

OK, the latter makes sense -- once you know where to line things up.

My tool does everything by itself -- unless you have taken bad photos to begin with. E.g., in one case, I had taken overlapping photos of a line of small trees. The pattern was probably too regular for it and it matched up the "wrong" trees in successive images.

In another (360) case, most of the photos were at near infinite distance (the horizon) but a couple with very close content (~10 feet). The resulting image was pretty significantly "bent". E.g., the cover photo in newsletter shows a similar curvature though not anywhere as severe!

Hmmm... I'll see what the various controls are. For the most part, I just snap photos until something looks "about right" (i.e., without really thinking about what I am doing -- though I've learned that "macro" is almost essential for anything within arm's reach)

Unless it does something that FrameMaker *doesn't* (which would be a stretch), I wouldn't be interested. I think Frame was only about $500 when I bought my first "version". So, I've maybe laid out ~$1K considering upgrades -- well worth the amount of use I get out of it! And, the number of bugs/workarounds that I've had to deal with is surprisingly few. (I don't like having to debug someone else's tools...)

Yes - multi-column layouts need synchronising like this.

For single-column layouts, it can be useful to stretch or shrink the vertical space a little to improve the layout, such as to avoid widows or orphans. I don't know how Frame Maker handles this - TeX will do it automatically within certain limits, and let you manually specify it outside that. And as usual with spacing, it applies more of the stretch to larger spaces such as inter-paragraph spaces than to inter-line spaces.

That's a little different from what I am used to with TeX / LaTeX, which treats everything as a whole. (You /can/ make framed boxes like this - sometimes that's very useful - but it's not the usual method). But then, Frame Maker and TeX are designed to work in very different ways - FM is much more of a visual layout tool, while TeX has a strong separation between visual appearance and textual content, and runs as a batch process.

Manual modifications like that are always a pain, especially if the document may be changed later. But sometimes they are unavoidable.

I managed to get by for years without using a word processor at all - LaTeX handled everything I needed. But unfortunately that poses certain challenges for working with colleagues and customers who don't use it.

I had missed the point in an earlier post where you said /you/ were the typesetter...

Here's a few tips - and I'm aware that these might be considered "style choices" rather than "good typesetting rules", and that you might also have knowingly broken them because of the short line-length constraints.

Use non-breaking spaces in cases like "Mr. Bill", "N. Sixth", and "3:00 pm".

Be /very/ careful with a name like "Kirk - Bear". I can see that you might want to write it that way, with spaces around the hyphen, as a sort of logo. But avoid line breaks that have the hyphen on the beginning of a line, and avoid ending a line with the hyphen if a neighbouring line is also (automatically) hyphenated.

Your vertical spacing around the picture on page 2 is unbalanced, and I think the "Upcoming Activities" needs more vertical space.

Other than that, it is - as I said before - very well done.

There is a big difference between technical writing and publications with more specific layout requirements.

Technical papers need good typesetting so that they are easy to read - newspapers (and library newsletters) need to look good to attract attention and readers. So for technical writing, you want as much to be automated as possible, and you use a software-friendly layout (such as long enough lines so that bad line breaks are rare). For newspapers, it's okay to spend more time on "artistic tweaking" to make it look good.

I am a well-balanced person - I can't draw landscapes /or/ living things :)

On a sunny day (Wed, 22 Dec 2010 10:58:32 +0100) it happened David Brown wrote in :

Yep, ~/compile/scribus/scribus-1.3.3.7/scribus still on my system, don't remember why it did not work, maybe it did not compile because of 'other things' it needed. carried from disk to disk :-) Probably left it there for 'one of these days'. TB size harddisks make you do that.

It seems written in C++ ,maybe that is why I left it.... :-)

Bloat by default. :-)

On a sunny day (Wed, 22 Dec 2010 13:05:39 +0100) it happened David Brown wrote in :

It is a gift, look at this site:

I would be surprised if a FrameMaker owner would switch to Scribus (not that I've used either, so my comparison here is based on third-hand knowledge and web sites). There are cases where free, zero-cost open source software is much better than expensive commercial equivalents, but I don't think this is one of them. This is especially in your case, where money is not an object (since you've already paid it), and long experience is a big point in FrameMaker's favour.

I am merely making the suggestion of Scribus for anyone wanting to try it. While I doubt that you would switch to using it, you may be interested in trying it for comparison.

And this takes the above mentioned powerpoint, with Brown, as a complete ICCV'03 presentation:

Worth the 18 minutes or so of watching it.

Jon

...

I believe that what Ernie Lundquist actually said is, "No matter how much you dislike pickles, it is, after all, the only thing you can do with cucumbers." Your version is more logical.

Jerry

I stand corrected. :> Though the "audio" version's stress on "CUEcumbers" [sic] is what always sticks in my mind...

That and:

"OOON... yellimahn"

"Help! I'm locked in the refrigerator!"

and, of course, the whole:

"get-TING hung UP. GETing HUNG up. HUNG up, getTING...." shtick.

I'll have to rummage through my stuph and see if I can find either of those...