[Activities] Panorama activity

Sat Oct 11 16:26:24 EDT 2008

My roomate and I wrote an auto-stitching Panorama Activity during the
Yahoo Hack Day at CMU yesterday (ended up winning the Hack for Good
award).  I'll be posting it in the wiki at some point today.  It needs
a whole lot of polishing, since it was written in 24 hours.

I ran into the same problem that Ben did with autowhitebalance and
autoexposure.  I looked through the ov7670 driver, and it seems
changing V4L2_CID_BRIGHTNESS should flip the auto exposure control
(AEC) bit in one of the registers.  I added support for changing
brightness to the camera module in Pygame, but either disabling AEC
doesn't work, or it just makes auto gain control and auto white
balance work even harder to change the image.  Other than that, the
stitching seems to work ok.  I'm going to pyramidize it at some point
to make it faster, and do something to improve the accuracy.  The
slowness of stitching doesn't effect the user experience much though,
because it only stitches after the user is done taking the pictures.

The Activity we wrote uses the Flickr API for an upload to Flickr
button.  I feel that this is the most important part.  There is
support for saving the stitched images as Journal entries, but it
would be wonderful if a kid anywhere in the world could see panoramas
taken by other kids elsewhere.  Flickr is far from ideal for this.
Beyond not really being designed for viewing panoramas, it is
currently set up to just upload every picture to my personal Flickr
account.  My API key, secret key, and an authentication token are
prerecorded in the activity, so anyone could potentially use those
values to edit existing photos and upload whatever to my Flickr
account:  http://flickr.com/photos/nrpatel/

It seems Gigapan doesn't have an upload API.  gigapan.org works in
Browse on my os767 XO, but panning around an image is pretty slow.
Anyone have ideas on this?  A better way to Flickr, ideas for
designing a new site, getting Gigapan to add an upload API, etc?

The other issue we ran into is integrating OLPCGames with pyGTK stuff.
 We used OLPCGames to take advantage of capturing the images as SDL
surfaces, but we also wanted pyGTK to pop up a Dialog box when the
user hits Save, asking for a Title, Tags, and a Description of the
panorama.  We hacked together something that does pop up the box and
saves correctly, but fails to ever destroy the box.  It then just sits
with the box open, preventing the user from using or exiting the
Activity.  Is it possible to use pyGTK beyond the toolbox while still
using OLPCGames?

Nirav

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 6:41 PM, Jeff Keller <jeff.keller at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah -- I sent my loaner unit off to Burning Man, but I should get it
> back soon, and I'd be delighted to talk about stitchers.  Randy
> Sargent and I wrote our own for GigaPan last summer because nothing
> else was up to the task.  It relies on a model of the GigaPan device's
> behavior to do rough placement, but it can auto-stitch 1000+ images
> with < 10 pixels rms displacement error, and it should be open-sourced
> one of these days.  Of course, it uses much more storage, RAM, and CPU
> than an XO has, but nothing inappropriate to what it does, and there
> are some nice improvements in the works.  Oh, and my office is down
> the block from OLPC's.
> --Jeff
>
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 12:38 PM, Samuel Klein <sj at laptop.org> wrote:
>> Speaking of which, Jeff Keller has been trying to get OLPC folks to
>> learn more about using his gigapan group's cameras (and perhaps to
>> borrow one to bring them into a country for weeks) for a while.  Jeff,
>> Ben Schwartz and Nirav are really interested in large-scale image
>> splicing...
>>
>> SJ
>> ---
>> 617 529 4266
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 2:08 AM, Brian Jordan <brian at laptop.org> wrote:
>>> *bump*
>>>
>>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Panorama_camera_activity
>>>
>>> (code? Nirav is interested in doing something similar!)
>>>
>>> Brian
>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 11:56 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>>>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>>>> Hash: SHA1
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>>>> The XO happens to be perfect for shooting stitched panoramic photographs, due to
>>>> the swivel design.  I tested it out in the OLPCHQ lobby. Then, I wrote a simple
>>>> panorama stitcher in 50 lines of Python.  It runs in 3.4 seconds on my Core Duo,
>>>> producing this output:
>>>>
>>>> http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~bmschwar/lobby_ugly.jpg
>>>>
>>>> The results aren't too bad.  I also tried stitching this scene with Hugin, the
>>>> most powerful panorama stitcher I know of.  Hugin required significant user
>>>> intervention and half an hour of computing time, producing this output:
>>>>
>>>> http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~bmschwar/lobby_pretty.jpg
>>>>
>>>> This scene is unusually difficult because of the huge indoor-outdoor contrast.
>>>> Given this positive result, I would like to work on a panorama-making activity,
>>>> possibly inside Capture.  I know that at age 10, I loved making panoramas out of
>>>> photographs.  Panoramas provide an immersive way for children to communicate
>>>> their environments to each other and to the world.
>>>>
>>>> - --Ben Schwartz
>>>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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>>>>
>>>> iD8DBQFGeU4yUJT6e6HFtqQRAv4rAJ9F5wTDfzz9piYzzwGskVVmaqZTiQCgjFru
>>>> QsRergUtY1iCZS6hIXCHjSM=
>>>> =v5GB
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>>>
>>
>