[bmh]

Microsoft seems to have discontinued ICE a long time ago. As far as I know, the state of the art in panorama stitching is PTGui.

I was working on mobile panorama stitching last year, and one of my datasets had a kitchen wall that was almost purely white, so very little detail for the classic feature algorithms such as SIFT and ORB to cling to. The OpenCV stitching pipeline, which is built on these (and RANSAC), didn't do very well when matching these walls.

But PTGui was amazing on this data - it would find just a tiny number of very high quality feature points to match (eg 3 or 4), and produce a perfect panorama. In addition, it's really fast. I was very impressed.

[PetitPrince]

True, but ICE is free while PT GUI is 150€.

And compared to the open source darling Hugin it has also a less fussy UI.

[ggm]

Hugin hasn't worked for me on macos well for a couple of years.

[actionfromafar]

I never got it work with my images. (Flatbed mosaic.)

[_aavaa_]

The fussy UI is nothing. The real benefit is the gpu acceleration. That alone is worth the money.

[LukasWeber]

A simple GUI would be great to let the user select high quality 3-4 matches (reference points) between the image pairs. Then the rest of the stitching pipeline could stay the same.

[bmh]

I'm convinced after the work I did on panoramas that one shouldn't need to involve user input. Maybe for very strange situations... but generally it shouldn't be necessary. This is especially true if you have access to the IMU on a phone, which helps constrain the potential angles of each of your images.

If your images are just a random bag of jpegs that came in from the cold, then it's harder for sure.

[folli]

So how did you solve the mobile panorama stitching? You ran PTGui on a backend server and uploaded the user images there?

[bmh]

I started from the OpenCV stitching_detailed example, and worked from there. That example runs pretty much out of the box on Android.

[folli]

Cool, thanks!