D Joiner

Rating:
Updated: 20 Dec 2001 at 5:00 GMT, by James Rigg [Panoguide]

This review is of version 1.0

D Joiner is a simple image stitcher... well, that was my impression when I first started it. However D Joiner can create cylindrical, spherical and planar panoramic images and also output spherical images in cubic format. As well as just outputing images it can also generate a simple web page for you using its own Java applet viewer.

Stitching is a manual process - you set corresponding points between images and D Joiner works out the rest. I expected to have to specify the lens or provide other information, but to my surprise D Joiner appears to use the points you define to work out what it needs to do, and just gets on with it.

When you request a preview stitch, D Joiner analyses the stitching points you have defined and will warn you if any of them appear to be mis-positioned by more than the tollerance level (see the screenshots). This is a very neat approach and one similar to what the Optimizer can do in Helmut Dersch's PanoTools. A possible addition would be to calculate the stitch accuracy (like PanoTools), which can be worked out by doing an average of the number of pixels inaccuracy of each stitching point.

Unfortunately I am not a fan of "manual" stitching programs... because they make a simple task more time consuming. The price of D Joiner puts it at the professional photographer end of the market, yet a professional panoramic photographer is unlikely to want to spend lots of his or her valuable time defining stitching points for each set of images to be stitched - (s)he would rather spend the time shooting more pictures and earning more money! By comparison to D Joiner, REALVIZ Stitcher has the advantage that it provides automatic stitching per image, and recently also batch job stitching and templating capabilities. On the other hand, no automatic stitching system is infallible, and D Joiner will make manual stitching easier (and much more precise) than simply dragging each image into alignment with the next.

D Joiner should I think be improved to provide similar functionality to PanaVue's Image Assembler - define a control point and the program uses pattern recognition to try to identify a more accurate match. This means that you need only approximately position your points, and you can then rely on the program to fine tune the positions. This would mean that the process is much faster and easier.

In my tests results were good, but I still got shear lines occuring. So perhaps more control points are required than the 3 or 4 per seam that I created, or perhaps I needed to define them more precisely. I had some problems running D Joiner on my Windows 98SE machine, but it is difficult to say whether this is due to my machine rather than D Joiner because of all the other software I run - on Windows 2000 I had no problems.

This is an interesting first version image stitching program from D Vision Works. If D Joiner incorporated more stitching/alignment intelligence to make it easier and faster to set matching points for the stitch (e.g. like the intelligence in PanaVue IA), or perhaps a full auto-stitch of some kind, it would be really great. I think the price is a little high at the moment, but as new features are added to future versions no doubt D Joiner will justify its professional price tag. D Joiner is one to watch.

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