Robot Dreams

This past weekend I spent the afternoon at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. From a human perspective it's personally old and historically old. Personally because it's been around before myself, my parents, and my grandparents where born. And historically because it stores for display Nature's history. Last time I was there, I went with my immediate family to both look at the dinosaur exhibits and to watch my nephew look at the dinosaur exhibits. This time around I, actually we but more about that later, went to see the Aztec exhibit before it closed. Unfortunately, there's no picture taking in the exhibit so I can't show that. Instead I have two panoramas of one of the Haida Totem Poles in the main hall, and of the main hall looking at the South entrance:

So that's the "old" stuff... The "new" stuff is whom I went with, my new girlfriend Cynthia! And since she reads this blog (hi Cynthia) perhaps she will grace it with a comment OK, so you may be asking what the two parts, other than going together to the Museum, might have in common. Well it turns out that Cynthia is an archeologist currently studying the Maya in Belize, although she's obviously not in Belize right now.

A few days ago I posted a panorama of the Toronto skyline. It turns out it was done by hand by loading up the images, doing some blending between them, aligning them, and brightness+contrast adjustments. And today, while trying to do the same to another set of images I failed. And I thought maybe someone has written some software to make such things easy. Well they have, somewhat. It turns out panorama stitching is not exactly easy and just about all the solutions out there are manual in more ways than one. Except one tool, which comes from the AI lab at the University of British Columbia, Autostitch. So I decided to run it through some of the multi-shot panorama images I have, really only three sets since I'm not a panorama fan. Below are two of the results. The first from the same set of images as that previous Toronto skyline post (warning this image is even larger than before), and the second from an earlier set of phone images taken at Kauai. But it figures that the set of two images that started this endeavor, Autostitch failed to put together. Neither man nor AI could solve the problem, maybe I just need to wait for some extraterrestrial intelligence.