Martin Evans
New member
I feel sure that this has been done by others, yet I have not come across examples.
The same software that is used to stitch panoramas can also be used to stitch a series of images of the outside of a cylindrical object, to create a flat, two dimensional, view of the surface of that cylinder.
The results of a couple of hasty, rough-and-ready, experiments are shown below. I used two objects to test the idea:
Each was placed on a turntable, and a series of images taken, the turntable being rotated by one-sixteenth of a turn (22.5 degrees) for each photo. Then each image was loaded into photo-editing software (Paintshop Pro 7) and cropped to a narrow vertical strip. The strips were then passed to a 'stitching' or merging program. I used the free ICE.exe from Microsoft, which is very easy to use, though I have not yet located a manual on how to fiddle with it.
The result from the cylindrical repro apothecary's jar is pretty good:
But the very spheroidal "octopus pot" (a museum repro of a Greek bronze-age vessel) was so far removed from cylindrical that the distortions could not be handled by ICE:
Nevertheless, even objects that are not strictly cylindrical can provide an interesting transformation to a two-dimensional view of their surface.
For more details, see:
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/mhe1000/musphoto/periphoto.htm
Has this all been done before? And better?
Martin
The same software that is used to stitch panoramas can also be used to stitch a series of images of the outside of a cylindrical object, to create a flat, two dimensional, view of the surface of that cylinder.
The results of a couple of hasty, rough-and-ready, experiments are shown below. I used two objects to test the idea:
Each was placed on a turntable, and a series of images taken, the turntable being rotated by one-sixteenth of a turn (22.5 degrees) for each photo. Then each image was loaded into photo-editing software (Paintshop Pro 7) and cropped to a narrow vertical strip. The strips were then passed to a 'stitching' or merging program. I used the free ICE.exe from Microsoft, which is very easy to use, though I have not yet located a manual on how to fiddle with it.
The result from the cylindrical repro apothecary's jar is pretty good:
But the very spheroidal "octopus pot" (a museum repro of a Greek bronze-age vessel) was so far removed from cylindrical that the distortions could not be handled by ICE:
Nevertheless, even objects that are not strictly cylindrical can provide an interesting transformation to a two-dimensional view of their surface.
For more details, see:
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/mhe1000/musphoto/periphoto.htm
Has this all been done before? And better?
Martin