After trying a number of other programs, I found out that ICE gives me the best results for my particular problem, hwich is to compose acceptable mosaics from pictures that are taken from altitude with the camera pointing at the nadire (straigth down). These
pictures are orthorectified and geotagged. While almost all programs insist on perspective mosaics, they do notr ender properly large sets of orthographic pictures. ICE does a decent job at it, mainly because one can chose a proper planar projection.
But I have a suggestion. More and more photos are tagged with their geolocation. In the aprticular case of aerial pictures, knowing that the phi and kappa (pitch and roll) of the camera is constant and perpendicular to the image, ICE could use
this information to significantly cut down on execution time. I attempted to use the structured serpentine panorama, but that failed because it is not always possible in aerial photography to predict the wind and thus the number of photos per row/column may
vary. Reading the geolocation in order to determine the closest image neighbours would overcome this problem.
If you, at Microsoft ICE, would like to experiment with his, I ahve large sets of survey pictures that I can contribute.
Thanks for a great program, guys.
