Engineering photography

Abstract

The use of panoramic photography to achieve wide viewing angles is becoming increasingly commonplace in our everyday lives. Current mobile phone cameras have a fixed angle of view due to their fixed-lens design, and have limited dynamic range and bit depth as compared to professional cameras, which have larger sensors, higher dynamic range and bit depth, as well as the ability to change viewing angles by swapping lenses. HDR and ETTR techniques are described and applied in order to maximise the dynamic range from mobile phone sensors, and multiple-row panoramic stitching is utilised to create a wide-angle result, which will be compared to conventional cameras. Traditional image stitching software, such as PTGui, will be used for the stitching of the mobile phone images, while a stitching algorithm in PTGui which utilises feature-based stitching will be studied to understand how panoramic images are stitched in software. The results of both PTGui and Matlab will be analysed to determine if the objective of creating a wider field-of-view with mobile phone cameras can be achieved.