Drew Steedly's dashboard

Drew Steedly replied on February 04, 2009 01:17 to the idea "Using the log (photosynth)" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll keep them in mind!

Drew Steedly replied on February 04, 2009 01:15 to the question "Wake up the Lazy Susan" in Microsoft Live Labs:

I'm glad you are enjoying Photosynth! Knowing that it is a turntable sequences are not trivial to add. The best thing to do is to not use a turntable and instead walk around the object--move the camera, not the subject. That way the background and the subject move according to the same rigid transformation relative to the camera and reinforce each other. Texture on background or subject can be used as opposed to the subject having to have enough texture to override the background.

Drew Steedly replied on February 02, 2009 22:13 to the question "Wake up the Lazy Susan" in Microsoft Live Labs:

In food nuts, the edges of the logos from the front and back of the can are very similar in the edges. These types of symmetries confuse the matching. By cropping the image, you removed a lot of the texture on the paper which had helped it disambiguate the symmetry in the 01 version. The ravioli can doesn't have this symmetry so works better.

In running, the object is fairly textureless. The majority in the image variation in the running images comes from occlusion edges (the edge of the body against the background), which changes appearance as you move around the object. The synther likes to lock on to texture that is on the surface of the object (if the figure had a textured body it might work better).

Drew Steedly replied on January 26, 2009 06:43 to the idea "Three Image Requirement - Dumb Software!!!" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Actually, the synther can generate a 2 image synth :-). The 3 image limit is artificial and will be lowered to 2 in a future release. For now, a workaround is to put in a random extra picture (not very elegant, I know).

Drew Steedly replied on January 23, 2009 15:59 to the question "List of "Not Matching Pics"" in Microsoft Live Labs:

You can get the file list from the log file (%TEMP%\Photosynther\<collectionname>.log). If you look at the end of the log file, you can find the image names that were in each group. Look for lines like this (the image names will be in parentheses):

Synth 0 : 9 images, 2907 points
0: 1 http://mslabs-713.vo.llnwd.net/d4/pho... (C:\Users\steedly\Data\statue\DSC00423.JPG)
1: 0 http://mslabs-277.vo.llnwd.net/d4/pho... (C:\Users\steedly\Data\statue\DSC00422.JPG)
2: 3 http://mslabs-305.vo.llnwd.net/d4/pho... (C:\Users\steedly\Data\statue\DSC00425.JPG)

<snip>

Synth 1 : 5 images, 770 points
0: 7 http://mslabs-778.vo.llnwd.net/d4/pho... (C:\Users\steedly\Data\statue\DSC00429.JPG)
1: 9 http://mslabs-883.vo.llnwd.net/d4/pho... (C:\Users\steedly\Data\statue\DSC00431.JPG)
2: 8 http://mslabs-967.vo.llnwd.net/d4/pho... (C:\Users\steedly\Data\statue\DSC00430.JPG)

<snip>

Synth 2 : 4 images, 836 points
0: 13 http://mslabs-338.vo.llnwd.net/d4/pho... (C:\Users\steedly\Data\statue\DSC00435.JPG)
1: 12 http://mslabs-831.vo.llnwd.net/d4/pho... (C:\Users\steedly\Data\statue\DSC00434.JPG)
2: 15 http://mslabs-261.vo.llnwd.net/d4/pho... (C:\Users\steedly\Data\statue\DSC00437.JPG)
3: 14 http://mslabs-350.vo.llnwd.net/d4/pho... (C:\Users\steedly\Data\statue\DSC00436.JPG)
</snip></snip></collectionname>

Drew Steedly replied on January 11, 2009 17:03 to the question "List of "Not Matching Pics"" in Microsoft Live Labs:

You can see the different groups of images that were reconstructed together by switching to the grid view. You get to grid view by clicking on the 3x3 grid of squares in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

You can try to get a 100% synthy collection by resynthing with just the images in one of the groups.

Getting the image names is a little more involved. The images that made up each group are listed at the end of the log file. You can find the log files in %TEMP%\Photosynther. Click on the start button, click on "Run...", enter %TEMP%\Photosynther in the dialog box and then click on OK.

A comment on the problem "Photosynth ran out of memory during processing (8007000E)" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Awesome! how did it turn out? – Drew Steedly, on September 03, 2008 16:57

Drew Steedly replied on September 03, 2008 16:52 to the problem "Photosynth ran out of memory during processing (8007000E)" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Each point in the scene you want to reconstruct should be observed in at least 3 cameras. This corresponds to 50% overlap as a bare minimum. 60-75% overlap is more reliable.

Drew Steedly replied on September 03, 2008 01:37 to the problem "Photosynth ran out of memory during processing (8007000E)" in Microsoft Live Labs:

This is the same issue Fduch is having. Unfortunately you are at the limit of what we can handle right now. One option is to try to reduce the amount of overlap some so you cover the same part of the scene with fewer images.

Drew Steedly replied on September 03, 2008 01:23 to the problem "Photosynth ran out of memory during processing (8007000E)" in Microsoft Live Labs:

clipo, can you post the end of the log file so I can see where it was when it ran out of memory? You can find it under %TEMP%\Photosynther\.

A comment on the problem "Photosynth ran out of memory during processing (8007000E)" in Microsoft Live Labs:

For lots of images with really dense overlap, the synther can find tons of matches. It tries to allocate some pretty big blocks of contiguous memory in the reconstruction phase, which appears to be the problem here. How many images were you uploading? – Drew Steedly, on September 03, 2008 01:20

Drew Steedly replied on September 03, 2008 01:04 to the question "Photosynth ran out of memory. Try again with fewer photos." in Microsoft Live Labs:

It could be that the synther is spawning off more threads than you have the memory to support. We do check the amount of free memory before spinning up threads, but that could be broken.

Are you on a multicore machine? If so, you can try turning off multithreading. Open a cmd prompt (click on Start->Run, type cmd and then hit OK). Then type:

set OMP_NUM_THREADS=1
C:\Program Files\Photosynth\PSWebClient.exe

If you are running 64 bit, then the install dir is different and you will need to run:

set OMP_NUM_THREADS=1
C:\Program Files (x86)\Photosynth\PSWebClient.exe

Drew Steedly replied on September 03, 2008 00:31 to the question "Always 0% synthy. Why??" in Microsoft Live Labs:

And we're working on a workaround which will likely involving just removing the FocalLengthIn35mmFilm tag. Stay tuned...

Drew Steedly replied on August 28, 2008 22:04 to the question "synth skipped upper left photo" in Microsoft Live Labs:

The synther messed up on the top left image and connected it very poorly. Until the synther can do a better job, one option is to take a few more pictures. One overview shot of the entire document might be all that is needed.

Drew Steedly replied on August 27, 2008 00:44 to the idea "Rotate image" in Microsoft Live Labs:

We use a couple of tricks. First, some cameras store the orientation of the camera when the image was taken (portrait vs landscape) in the metadata. Second, we assume that people may tilt and pan the camera a lot but generally roll it very little (meaning the horizon is roughly horizontal).

If your synth shows up rotated by 90 degrees, this could be because your camera doesn't store the orientation information and many of your photos were taken in portrait mode. Rotating the images upright before synthing will help eliminate this problem.

Of course, we'll still have problems with synths like flips where we just can't get it right automatically. In this case, having an interface where you can manually fix it up is a great idea.