Category Archives: Cool Shit

While You Wait – Image Stitching

We’re currently encoding/working on Code Geass R2 1-5, SG 9-10 BD’s, Ore no Imouto 3, Katanagatari 1-12, Steins;Gate 1, and the Zombie 1-2 BD’s, so while you wait, check this out.

Image Stitching

Have you ever wanted to capture a scene in an anime or movie where the camera pans in one direction from one location? Have you tried taking multiple screenshots and “stitching” them together, only to find yourself frustrated by a “gradient” banding effect, such as the one below?

In order to reduce or eliminate the banding effect, you need to take several photos and overlay and align each successive photo on top of the other. This can get very meticulous and time-consuming—Strike spent over 30 seconds per screenshot aligning 23 different screenshots to reconstruct a scene and I spent over 23 seconds a screenshot aligning 81 photos!

Image Composite Editor from Microsoft Research

Now, I’m not sure if I’m just late to the party or what, but there’s actually software that does all this for you. Microsoft Research has released a program called Image Composite Editor (32-bit | 64-bit) that takes an arbitrary amount of photos and automatically stitches them together using advanced motion detection and sophisticated black-box techniques I am totally unaware of.

Now, the next issue is taking the actual screenshots. Here’s an Avisynth script that takes in a video, trims it, converts the color-plane to RGB32, and writes the images to hard disk:

X = "[Yousei-raws] Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Girls 07 [BDrip 1920x1080 x264 FLAC].mkv"

ffindex(X)

ffvideosource(X)

trim(15961, 16074)

convertToRGB32()

ImageWriter(file="G:\Encoding Platform\Docking\", type="png", info=true)

In order to get the highest quality composite image possible, I decided to grab every-single-frame and slam ’em into Image Composite Editor.

Side-note: This program takes up A LOT of memory. I used over 113 photos at 1920×1080 and this program took up over 5.1 GIGABYTES of RAM. No joke.

But the results are amazing. Check it out:

Oh btw, this post is NSFW, but I tried to convince Strike that our readers could claim that this was strictly educational.

(6:54:28 PM) helios2k6: in my defense
(6:54:31 PM) helios2k6: this is strictly
(6:54:32 PM) helios2k6: educational
(6:54:37 PM) helios2k6: i'm talking about photo stitching
(6:54:39 PM) helios2k6: not boobs
(6:54:39 PM) strikezcoal: LOL
(6:54:45 PM) strikezcoal: that's totally bullshit!

I maintain my innocence.