Adobe AIR panoramic photo stitcher
Update: The CleVR Stitcher can now be found at http://www.clevr.com/stitcher
The Stitcher is the oldest part of CleVR, originally developed nearly four years ago, so it’s needing an upgrade. It was developed in Java, delivered by Web Start, a system that I’ve never been happy with. I decided that the best plan for the new version was to rewrite it from scratch. It’s a Flex-based Adobe AIR app. AIR, formerly called Apollo, is a new cross-platform runtime under development by Adobe. The first beta was released earlier this month, and it’s a joy to develop for. I’m pleased to announce the first alpha version of the new AIR-based CleVR Stitcher. You’ll need a CleVR account to use it. It’s free, and only takes a couple of minutes to sign up.
The choice for the development platform will be surprising to many people. The idea of doing computer vision and image processing in Flash sounds like madness, but the advances in Flash Player 9 make it possible. While developing the CleVR panorama viewer, it became apparent to me quite how powerful some of the new features were, and the performance improvements in the new Player have made it feasible. The current version is slower than the Java stitcher, but there’s a lot more optimisation that I can do, and it’s certainly usable.
Currently it’s missing a number of features from the Java version, most importantly the ability to repair failed stitches. However, I’ve made several improvements to the algorithms, so there should be fewer failed stitches. The repair facility will be added in a future release, as will several other useful features.
Give it a try, and let me know of any bugs that you find, and any other comments that you have.
June 27th, 2007 at 8:03 am GMT
Very cool!
I’m going to have to take a few pictures tomorrow and give it a try! I don’t know that you’d use it, but I just today finished a JPEG thumbnail extractor. It uses the AIR file IO features to read the embedded thumbnail image out of the JPEG itself. Let me know if you’d like an advanced look (I’ll blog it too).
Keep up the good work!
Kevin
September 12th, 2007 at 1:32 pm GMT
why should the stitcher be downloaded and installed. Can it run as the pano viewer which is embeded in IE or firefox?
September 12th, 2007 at 8:27 pm GMT
If it was embedding in the browser it wouldn’t be able to load your images, as it wouldn’t have access to your hard drive. Likewise, you’d not be able to save images for the same reason.
September 13th, 2007 at 1:50 am GMT
Then, what’s the difference between panoramic photo stitcher built on Adobe AIR and those written by C/C++ or other language?
In my opinion, one of the reason why flash becomes so popular is that when you open a flash program on web you don’t have to install it. Of course, you have to install flash player first. It seems to me that program built on AIR should be installed first. Some users may don’t like to install software when they are surfing on Internet.
I don’t know much about AIR. I just raise my concern. Thanks!
February 26th, 2008 at 7:53 am GMT
On installation you will get this message.
This application may access your file system and the internet, which may put your computer at risk.
Isn’t ‘may’ a little understated?
Why was it beyond the ken of the developers to have a pre-installation routine that created a sandbox(partition drive Z volume name sandbox) and then only allowed air apps to access data in the sandbox? The user would be free to move data not apps between the sandbox and his system.
Hackers all over the world will be excited at getting their hands on this product.
February 26th, 2008 at 8:54 am GMT
The warning is generated by Adobe AIR: the wording is not something we have control over. But I don’t see how this is such a problem. This is no more access than almost every other app you have installed on your machine.
May 8th, 2008 at 5:31 am GMT
[…] CleVR Stitcher: […]
May 21st, 2008 at 10:01 am GMT
Nice bit of kit, will be giving it a try this weekend.
Andy
www.udiggit.com
June 5th, 2008 at 12:08 pm GMT
[…] CleVR Stitcher by Sphex LLP […]
June 18th, 2008 at 12:08 am GMT
it doesn’t work for me. i downloaded it and everything but i waited an hour and it still didn’t stitch.