Photography is digital. There is no arguing with that; barring some extremely niche technical/scientific applications and haute art in every area the photographer is left with an image file as soon as the shot is taken. For home use, for the entertainment, news or advertising industry the digital images are the choice dictated by the needs of speed, convenience and, accounting for all factors, often of economy as well. Naturally, the modern real estate field where expedient presentation of offered residential or business premises is paramount went digital-photo the same way it went Web-based.
But, every new enabling technology brings out new challenges. As taking photos became easier, the average quality plummeted. As new features of advanced image manipulation became available, everybody seems to require them in every photo and sneer at images not enhanced to the last pixel.
One of the areas where digital photography became a great enabler is the real estate market. Visiting the property, the agent can easily take as many photos as desired for placing on the website, emailing to prospective customers, etc. One of the ways to attract customer attention, to bring out the most desirable aspects of the property and create an immersive experience is to present the photos as a panoramic image.
Like no other method (we’re not talking bulky and lengthy video clips here) a panorama can provide an informative view of both interiors and exteriors of rooms, buildings and locations.
So what’s the problem? First, stitching images by hand is a lengthy process that takes skill to look acceptable; second, most software provided with digital cameras includes a stitching function, but mostly those are low-quality and often fail to perform with images taken by other cameras.
PhotoStitcher uses highly advanced algorithms for stitching images, with automatic focal length correction, horizon alignment and sharpness enhancement. Using grayscale correlation methods with Strongin’s global optimization, PhotoStitcher delivers high performance so demanded by the real estate industry.
It’s not surprising that real estate agencies are no Hollywood render farms; for years they’ve been using common office computers with hardly a need for upgrading them every couple of years. At the same time the current crop of digital cameras often produce 4-Mb pictures by default, stitching those can grind an office computer to a halt. We offer uncompromised quality with a different approach to the resource-intensive focal length matching operation; instead of resource-intensive complete iteration of possible values PhotoStitcher uses overlap area central line correlation with subsequent pixel-by-pixel optimization. The performance gain is such that unlike Panorama Factory where focal length matching is performed only for one pair of images in the diagram, PhotoStitcher recalculates the focal lengths for every overlap area between all images. Well-documented development in C++ language using the Visual Studio environment and open-standards WX Widgets library assures the expandability of PhotoStitcher to suit any further requirements of the customers.
