AutoStitch: Panoramic image creation for the iPhone

The iPhone app store may be home for some 50,000 applications but few are actually worth the download, free of charge or not. One of these few applications that are a must have for every iPhone owner is AutoStitch by Cloudburst Research Inc.

This nifty application can create panoramic or wide-angle images from any arrangement of photos and minimal user guidance. The latter two features are what makes AutoStitch such a great application. Any arrangement of photos means that you don't have to take your photos in sequence for the stitching to work; the application can figure out the overlap between images on its own by the use of state-of-the-art feature-based image matching techniques. And minimal user guidance means that you only have to point the application to the directory where all your photos are stored and it will gladly stitch together all those photos that belong to the same scene. The photo at the top of this post is an example panorama created using this application (the image is copyright Cloudburst Research Inc.)

If you recall, I wrote in the past about image stitching software including the high resolution Gigapan system, the desktop version of AutoStitch, and the open source autopano-sift. Microsoft's Photosynth maybe the one related application that is best known to you. Similar software is available today in several commercial image processing software packages. Interestingly, the founders of Cloudburst are also the first to publish the method that makes Autostitch and all these other panorama creation software work so well.

Learn more about the iPhone Autostich application at the company's website here or you can buy the application from the App Store for $1.99 here.