Autopano Pro is the image stitching software that assembled the second largest photograph of the world. It has been developed by the French company Kolor, founded in October 2004 by Alexandre Jenny and Lionel Laissus. Autopano Pro is one of the few software to have a license of a professional SIFT.

Stitcher of the world's second biggest photograph

Autopano Pro was used to stitch 'Harlem 13 Gigapixels', one of the Largest photographs in the world by photographer Gerard Maynard. This photo of Harlem, New York, includes 2045 source images and has 13 gigapixels. It is the second largest world's photograph as of February 10th, 2008.

About the project

Harlem 13 Gigapixels is a collaboration between artist Gerard Maynard and Kolor Company. Gerard Maynard is a photographer working in Harlem, New York. Several museums exhibited his work: Brooklyn Museum, New York; Deitch Projects, New York; John Connelly Presents, New York; and D'Ameilo Terras, New York. Autopano Pro is the result of a long-time collaboration between Kolor, Dr. David Lowe, and Mr. Matthew Brown of University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Shooting

The 2045 photos were shot on August 13, 2006, during 2 hours and 10 minutes (4.43 pm to 6.53pm). The camera used was a Nikon D2X, with a 300mm Nikkor lens. Each image sizes 12 megapixels; the initial data is 21.49 gigabites of compressed RAW files. The photographer was standing on the roof of a building at 7th Avenue and 110th Street in New York City.

Stitching

Autopano Pro stitched the 2045 images with a workflow separated into 2 passes. The first one was to cope with detection and optimization of the panorama. The second pass was to render the panorama. Some pictures had to be placed manually and the color correction engine was improved to be able to support such a big image set. A 64bits Linux version of the program was used, running on a special hardware: a dual xeon quad-core processor with 8GB of memory and 2 high-speed 150GB hard drives. The rendering process of this 13 Gigapixel panorama took 46 hours.

Further reading

Frich, Arnaud - Panoramic Photography: From Composition and Exposure to Final Exhibition ISBN: 978-0240809205

External links

Autopano Pro homepage.