Panoramic Photography with a Linear Scanner

Although digital photography took a big bite of the film industry’s lunch, it wasn’t able to completely eliminate the need — or desire — for photographers to use film in …. Panoramic Photography with a Linear Scanner. But digital information from a camera sensor can be manipulated to augment the natural physical capabilities of a camera in ways not really feasible for film.

High dynamic range images, focus and exposure stacking, and automatic panoramic stitching. This camera takes the latter example to the extreme. [Philo]’s proof of concept was a smartphone camera set on a chair and rotated around a room.

Some software grabbed a single column of pixels as it moved and stitched them all together to form an image. This came out well enough that the idea was refined a few times, but it wasn’t until a single-line digital camera meant for imaging assembly lines was found that this really took off. Using the camera and some custom software, [Philo] was eventually able to take some of the longest panoramic images we’ve seen, using things like railways and boats as the track the camera rides on, with accelerometer data to help stabilize the image.