How do I stitch images together?

[Steverino]

I have a fairly long object and am using four identical cameras to image it. The cameras are all oriented perdendicular to the object's long axis and are evenly spaced. Therefore if I could connect the images end-to-end, they would yield a single image of the object. Understandably, I would need to align the images, correct for distortion, etc.

Is there a way to stitch images together in VB using IMAQ?

Thanks!

[BruceAmmons]

In VB, no.

You could write a program in LabVIEW.  You would need to figure out the distortions and correct for them, then merge the corrected images.  You could use the NI calibration for the correction, but you wouldn't necessarily get the same scale on each corrected image.

Is there a significant benefit of merging the images?  You would probably be better off calibrating each image separately, then locating several known reference points in each image - one point in each overlap area might work well.  Once you figure out relative positions of the images, you could make measurements between images.  For display, you could do an approximate merge of the original images without correcting the distortion.  It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be fine for most applications.

Bruce