CSE 590SS - Panorama 3: My Fridge
Since I didn't want to do yet another scenic campus location for my hand-held
panorama, I decided to "think outside the box". Or rather, inside the box -- my fridge.
I used my own not-too-fancy digital camera
(Olympus D360-L)
in "macro mode" (meant for taking pictures of
close objects). Using masking tape and a magic marker,
I manually positioned the camera so that its center of focus was more or less in the same
place for each frame. I set the timer and flash, and closed the door most of the way
(so the light was still on) while the picture was being taken.
Unfortunately, the fridge presents a lot problems for making panoramas:
- Since the objects are really close, the camera's position is extremely important.
Manually placing the camera was going to cause problems, and the situation was surely
worsened by the face that the bars that the camera rested on weren't too even.
- The labels mean that there are a lot of sharp edges and words that will be very noticable if the alignment
isn't perfect.
- Because I'm using the flash, each picture is lit differently. Plus there are lots of
glass things and plastic wrap that show highlights easily.
- Since I was using my own camera, I'd have to calculate the focal length myself.
This is discussed on another page.
- Things in the fridge got wetter as time went on. Moreover, I had to complete the
picture-taking before my milk went bad...
In the end, the result wasn't too bad, as you can see in the panorama below.
Sometimes I had to run the Lucas-Kanade algorithm with a lot of different starting values
to get it into the right local minimum, because the amount of rotation between frames varied a lot.
The automatic blending algorithm did a good job of dealing with the color changes between adjacent
images. You can see some double highlights
and double shadows on the plastic wrap, however. Also, three of the pictures were too close together,
and taken from slightly different views, causing problems on the right side of the "House Italian"
bottle.
Full image:
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