I had a question on my blog about a week ago regarding the panoramic feature in Windows Live Photo Gallery. Specifically Bradders wanted to know if this was a first implementation of our Photsynth technology. Only one way to find out - ask the products guys and Rick Szeliski from Microsoft Research kindly came back with some detailed answers:

"It's derived from the same technology that previously shipped in Digital Image Suite, both of which were developed in conjunction with MSR’s Interactive Visual Media group. The same team that created the PhotoTourism technology that powers PhotoSynth.

We started developing the stitching technology in 1996, and have shipped it inside a number of Digital Image Suite versions. The version shipping now inside the Window Live Photo Gallery is the latest (and best) version of our software yet.

Photosynth is a project that started out as a collaboration between Rick Szeliski, Noah Snavely and Steve Seitz at the University of Washington called “Photo Tourism”.  It was later combined with the Seadragon multi-resolution image streaming technology to create the Photosynth system that people may be familiar with.  Both sets of technologies use similar early-stage processing pipelines, which extract features from images in order to match up overlapping images (see Rick's Tutorial on Image Stitching for a detailed technical review of feature extraction and matching). 

The main difference is in the second half of the processing pipeline.  Image stitching software assumes that all images were taken from the same point, so that they can be seamlessly stitched into a single image.  Photosynth assumes that the pictures are taken from different points of view, and can therefore be used to create a 3D model of the scene.  On the flip side, it isn’t possible to stitch all the photos into a single image, so we use “morphing” 3D transitions to move between individual images.

We are currently working on techniques to merge these two processing pipelines, so that you can just input all of your photos into a single system, and have it discover all of the panoramas and Photosynth's in your collection.  In the future, we also expect the same viewer to be able to view and navigate both kinds of content.  Stay tuned to the Photosynth page for more details."

 

So there you go - a very thorough explanation of where we've come from, got to and possibly going with all of this advanced imaging technology. I love the work of Microsoft Research - it's stunning to spend some time with them and truly see the magic of software coming to life!

thanks Rick!