I hate everything, and especially image-stitching software

[kaberett]

Can I have recs, please? I am working with two image sets. Both are taken in serpentine fashion.

In one set, I have approximately 1500 tiles total (making up five composite images), and they look something like this:



... i.e. I just want the central portion, and I want a whole bunch of not-quite-circles fishscaling in a serpentine fashion, and I REALLY don't want to have to do it all (including cropping) by hand on a per-image basis.

The second image set is only about 180 tiles (forming 12 images), and each tile looks rather more like this:



... and are arranged in serpentine fashion. I anticipate these being rather easier.

Unfortunately, Hugin chokes and dies (i.e. crashes complete with sending error reports to the mothership), and I haven't worked out why and can't be bothered to diagnose it.

For the second image set at least, the Microsoft Image Composite Editor might be useful... except that where I have files named e.g. ./BR6a-31.tif through to ./BR6a-36.tif, "New Structured Panorama" tiles them like so:

36	31	32
35	34	33

... which is making me SUPER SAD. And they have no effective manual image repositioning - HURRAH.

... any suggestions?

... please? ;_;

Comments

[alexwlchan]

I’m thinking a Python script might be able to do it? (I’m thinking of the stuff people used to stick that epic XKCD together.) Or I suspect attacking the images with Mathematica might work. Not sure how useful either of those are to you, alas.

I will think about the problem more in the morning though. *yawns*

[kaberett]

I would sulk less about learning Python for this than about doing it by hand. :-)

[alexwlchan]

So I’ve just spent a bit too long hitting Mathematica to see if I can stitch two images together. I can! \o/

I’m not scaling it to ~1500 tiles or whatever tonight. I have a 9am lecture tomorrow. /o\

[insert snerk about how every problem looks like a maths question to a mathmo]

[kaberett]

mate if I can get this to work you're getting a fucking acknowledgement

[alexwlchan]

Right, I really must go to bed, but...

An easier answer might lie in just renaming files. (Cos scaling this function to multiple images suddenly seems like work. Also lectures and stuff.) I have stackloads of tools and scripts solely for that purpose. How big are the individual files? Are they, say, Dropbox-able or something? If I renamed them, could you stitch them as you want them.

*scuffles back to bed*

[ghoti]

is there a way to rename them to trick the image composite software into arranging them the way you need?

[kaberett]

maybe? but it would involve fucking up my record keeping, i.e. my maps all have numbering in the correct order :-(

[ghoti]

copy them into a new folder and rename in there? preserves the originals.

[kaberett]

There is also the bit where the idea of manually renaming 180 images makes me wanna cry? >_>

[ghoti]

there is also that.

[marahmarie]

There are ways to do that without pulling too much hair (assuming Windows here). There are tools to automate it, too. Also, most full Explorer (not IE, but Windows Explorer) replacements include batch file rename utilities as part of their core tools.

[kaberett]

Cheers for the link. Unfortunately only the final suggestion looks relevant, and given that I have e.g. BR1a-1 up to BR1a-44, separated along the way at e.g. BR1a-15 and BR1a-32, and will need to rejig number along those lines, it would... still be more work than I'm totally eager to do just because a bit of software doesn't appear to work?

[gerald_duck]

I'm not quite clear what you're after. If it's just stitching together a bunch of rectangular images to make a larger rectangular image, ImageMagick would seem to be an appropriate command-line tool: convert -page +x+y sourcefile1.tiff -page +x+y sourcefile2.tiff ... destfile.tiff

You'd then need to script up converting everything, which you could do in pretty much any programming language that allows you to invoke external commands.

However, it sounds like what you actually want is something that performs intelligent photo-stitching? /-8

[kaberett]

Yep.

[bjh21.me.uk]

Assuming you're still in Cambridge, this is the kind of thing that my colleagues in Scientific Computing Support (http://www.ucs.cam.ac.uk/scientific/advice) really ought be able to help with.