WANT to reshape a panoramic photograph to a more standard format without distorting perspective? A group of 18th-century painters have shown the way.
, a retired software engineer based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and his team knew that the 18th-century vedutisti painters had excelled at wide-angled views of Italian cities that appeared to preserve perspective perfectly. They couldn鈥檛 have done this with the rectilinear method of capturing perspective that most camera lenses use, he reasoned.
So the team set about reverse-engineering the trick by picking 14 vedutisti paintings of the interiors of buildings for which they had ground plans. They identified 20 points in each painting and located them on the corresponding plan. They then used this information to create a mathematical projection function and incorporated it into a piece of software, called . Panini can squash the width of a panoramic image while retaining perspective.
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鈥淭he team set about reverse-engineering the trick by picking 14 vedutisti 辫补颈苍迟颈苍驳蝉鈥�
In the photo, a 180-degree panorama of the London Eye has been reshaped using Panini. The upper image shows a rectilinear version of the same shot.
Team member , a computer scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, presented the work at the conference in London last week.
