In this project, you will write software which combines a series of photographs into a 360° panorama. Your software will detect useful features in the images, find the best matching features in your other images, align the photographs, then warp and blend the photos to create a seamless panorama. You will be able to view the resulting panorama inside an interactive web viewer.

This project can be thought of as two major components:

1. Feature Detection and Matching
2. Panorama Mosaic Stitching

To start your project, you will be supplied with some test images and skeleton code you can use as the basis of your project. Because this project is more extensive you can work in groups of two. Each component will result in an executable which you will use via the command line and appropriate arguments (features.exe and panorama.exe). Calling these in the correct order with reasonable arguments will allow you to generate your panorama. More detailed descriptions of these can be found in the Features and Panorama sections.

The following files are available for download. Alternately, you can have one with everything.

• Feature detection skeleton and its solution executable
• Panorama stitching skeleton and its solution executable
• Several image sets
• Script files for GNUPlot
• The 360° panorama viewer applet
• A template for your web deliverable

We have also added a .bat script which demonstrates running all commands except blendPairs for the test set, and a pairlist.txt file for the same set which includes the expected alignPairs results for the pano test set. Note that the .bat script assumes that it, features.exe, panorama.exe, and the target images are all present in the same folder. Here is a second .bat script (one command) that demonstrates using blendPairs, for which the pairlist file must also be present.

If you're unfamiliar with .bat scripts, it's a text file containing line-delimited console commands. You can open it in Notepad or another text editor to see what's going on. It can be helpful to execute them from within a terminal session so that the execution window stays open after the script runs (Start+R, enter cmd).

You may also want to install IrfanView. This program is very helpful for opening and transcoding image formats (among other things). This article on its batch conversion feature may be helpful when converting your photographs to .tga format. (Photoshop users: be aware that it does some sanity checking when opening files which may fool you while debugging, specifically about whether your alpha channel is correct.)

The steps required to complete the panorama are listed below:

	Step	EXE
1.	Take pictures on a tripod (or handheld)
2.	Warp to spherical coordinates	Panorama
3.	Extract features	Features
4.	Match features	Features
5.	Align neighboring pairs using RANSAC	Panorama
6.	Write out list of neighboring translations	Panorama
7.	Correct for drift	Panorama
8.	Read in warped images and blend them	Panorama
9.	Crop the result and import into a viewer

Although this is the final order of operations, you can complete Features.exe and Panorama.exe in parallel and test on other images.

Features.exe and Panorama.exe are command line programs that requires arguments to work properly. Thus you need to run it from the command line, or from a shortcut to the executable that has the arguments specified in the "Target" field of the shortcut properties. The one exception to this is that running Features.exe without command line arguments opens up the UI.

To run from the command line, click the Windows Start button and select "Run". Then enter "cmd" in the "Run" dialog and click "OK". A command window will pop up where you can type DOS commands. Use the DOS "cd" (change directory) command to navigate to the directory where Features.exe or Panorama.exe is located. Then type "Features" or "Panorama" followed by your arguments. If you do not supply any arguments, the program will print out information on what arguments it expects or open the UI in the case of Features.exe.

Another way to pass arguments to a program is to create a shortcut to it. To create a shortcut, right-click on the executable and drag to the location where you wish to place the shortcut. A menu will pop up when you let go of the mouse button. From the menu, select "Create Shortcut Here". Now right-click on the short-cut you've created and select "Properties". In the properties dialog select the "Shortcut" tab and add your arguments after the text in the "Target" field. Your arguments must be outside of the quotation marks and separated with spaces.

You can run the skeleton program from inside Visual Studio. However, you will need to tell Visual Studio what arguments to pass. Here's how:

1. Select the "ImageLib" project in the Solution Explorer (do NOT select the "Panorama" project).
2. From the "Project" menu choose "Properties" to bring up the "Property Pages" dialog.
3. Select the "Debugging" Property page.
4. Enter your arguments in the "Command Arguments" field.
5. Click "Ok".
6. Now when you execute your program from within Visual Studio the arguments you entered will be passed to it automatically.
7. Repeat the above steps for the solution for the Features component.

In addition to your source code and executables, turn in a web page describing your approach and results. In particular:

• You will need to compute two sets of ROC curves and post them on your web page. For both pairs of test images provided on the Features project webpage, create a plot with two curves, one using the SSD distance and the other using the ratio test distance. Also, please include the SIFT curves we provide for you on your graphs (these can be found on the Features project webpage). You can learn more about ROC curves from the class slides and on the web here and here. Instructions for generating the plots are provided on the Features project webpage under "To do."
• For one image each in both the Yosemite and graf test pairs, please include an image of the Harris operator on your webpage. This image is produced by the Features.exe executable every time it is run in computeFeatures mode (it is saved to the file harris.tga). If these images seem too dark, you can multiply the Harris score by a constant, such as 2, to make the scores more visible.
• Describe any extra credit items that you did (if applicable).

This portion of the web page should containin the following:

• At least three panoramas:
  1. The test sequence
  2. One from the Kaidan head
  3. One from a hand-held sequence
• Each panorama must be shown as:
  1. A low-res inlined image on the web page
  2. A link that you can click on to show the full-resolution .jpg file
  3. An embedded panoramic viewer applet as described above.
• A short description of what worked well and what didn't. If you tried several variants or did something non-standard, please describe this as well.
• Describe any extra credit items that you did (if applicable).

The web-page should be placed in the project2/artifact directory along with all the images in JPEG format. If you are unfamiliar with HTML you can use WYSIWYG-style editor such as Microsoft Word. It may be easiest to modify our template.

• Panoramas.dk: weekly archive of full-screen, high-quality panoramas worldwide
• VR Seattle: Seattle & Washington panoramas
• Matt Brown's Autostitch page
• Peruvian Panoramas