Panoramic Images Stitching Feature

Description

The PANO feature takes multiple overlapping images in different directions using a Pimoroni, Waveshare or compatible Pan Tilt Hat. Drivers and dependencies are installed during the curl pi-timolo-install.sh setup. PANO feature can run in parallel with TIMELAPSE_ON = True including TIMELAPSE_PANTILT_ON and/or any of the Motion Tracking Options eg Full Size Still Image MOTION_TRACK_ON = True (Other Motion options Set to False) or one of MOTION_VIDEO_ON or MOTION_TRACK_MINI_TL_ON or MOTION_TRACK_QUICK_PIC_ON. See config.py comments for more details.

Operation

To Enable the Pano mode set the config.py variables below

PANTILT_ON = True           # True= Enable Pan Tilt Hat hardware,  False= Disable for TIMELAPSE_PANTILT_ON and PANO_ON
PANO_ON = True              # True= Enable panoramic image using pantilt overlapping images

Depending on the type of pantilthat Pimoroni, Waveshare or Compatible you will need to set the variable below accordingly.

PANTILT_IS_PIMORONI = True   # True= Use Pimoroni pantilehat, False= Use Waveshare pantilthat

You should review the other PANO options and edit to your needs.

The default PANO_CAM_STOPS is configured to take three images around the pantilt pan center area 36 degrees apart based on a default 1280 x 720 image resolution. This provides enough overlap (if there is sufficient lighting) to successfully stitch a Panoramic image. These can be viewed using the pi-timolo webserver under pano, panos. Scroll across image using the bottom slide bar to see rest of pano image to the right.

/usr/local/bin/image-stitching is a modified version of OpenPano that I modified to allow for specifying an Output file path as the first parameter. /usr/local/bin/image-stitching needs a config.cfg file that is located in the main pi-timolo directory. Do not delete or modify this file. It might be possible to edit some of the config.cfg options but make a backup copy or do a menubox UPGRADE to restore default settings.

I have tested pano, timelapse and motion tracking simultaneously on a single core RPI. It takes a several minutes to stitch three images so I had to set the PANO_TIMER_SEC longer than 180 seconds or you would get multiple overlapping image-stitching's operations at the same time. This brought the single core system to a crawl (ok if you set PANO_TIMER_SEC to a long time. I like to take a pano once every hour or 3600 seconds. I advise at least a quad core RPI since stitching will happen in it's own cpu core.

See pi-timolo config.py file details per variable comments.

NOTE: If you change the image resolution you may have to adjust the PANO_CAM_STOPS to ensure images are overlapping enough. You can increase the number of stops but make sure PANO_TIMER_SEC

Successful stitching requires good lighting so it is advised to run only during the day. I may add a PANO_NO_NIGHT option (Let Me Know)