Indoor Equirectangular Panorama

Tools

I used a Nikon D200 and Sigma 8mm lense and hugin to assemble the image data.

Background

In the past, I’d used Arcsoft’s Panoramamaker. Hugin is more difficult to use, but can handle image sets and scenarios that Panoramamaker would never be able to process.

Method

The first attached image is an equirectangular projection of six circular fish-eye images shot using an 8mm Sigma lense on the Nikon D200.

The individual shots are taken facing north, south, east, west, up and down. The camera is carefully aligned so that it is rotated for each shot around the nodal point where light enters the lense, rather than around the base of the camera.

Hugin is used to set control points which interlink all six images and to optimize image alignment for position, view and barrel distortion. Finally, an equirectangular projection is generated which has a total field of view of 360×180 degrees.

Other projection types, such as sinusoidal and stereographic, were generated.