A lot of people seem to think Microsoft is all about Windows and Office, and that’s it. The reality is there is a lot more going on at Redmond than you might think. The best part is a lot of the Research that goes on at Microsoft is freely available on the Internet. Take Microsoft “ICE” for example. Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution.
Finally you can take your new creation and save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.
Microsoft ICE Features
The Image Composite Editor is completely free. Microsoft explains that some of the major features are it’s ability to stitch pictures together like nothing that has been commercially available before, and also has some pretty amazing export formats. Some features include:
- State-of-the-art stitching algorithms
- Advanced orientation adjustment view
- Exposure blending
- Output in many formats:
- HD View
- Silverlight Deep Zoom
- TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and more
Download Microsoft Image Composite Editor
So want to try out Microsoft Image Composite Editor? Don’t run out to the store. Just click one of the download links below:
If you want to learn more about Microsoft ICE, check out the Microsoft Research Website for ICE project.
If you liked this article, please share it on DZone, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Digg. I’d appreciate it.
is there an iMac version of the software?