Stich Panorama is a plug-in for the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) which takes digital images and overlays one atop the other to make a panorama. With multiple applications of Stitch Panorama, any number of images can be combined into a large panorama. Features include image blending, color balance, and distortion matching. The above image was stitched together from four separate images. Try it yourself, the images are in the example directory.
The Stich Panorama plug-in gives give you a lot of control over how the final panorama is stitched together. You select the features to correlate in the images, how the blending is to be done, and how the colors are to be matched. Extensive control over the final panorama was a major design goal. There are other, more automated, tools available (see below), but I prefer to have as much control as possible over the stitching process. The final panorama uses a rectilinear projection, well suited to panoramas that do not cover an excessive field-of-view. However, the rectilinear projection will not work well for panoramas that cover a full 360 degrees.
Stich Panorama is written in the Python language and requires that your GIMP has python support compiled in.
Documentation (PDF).
This page and the example images are copyright © 2005 Thomas R. Metcalf. All rights reserved.