Stitching Together Scanned Images

Recently, I was scanning a lot of legal sized documents, but my scanner could only scan A4 sized paper. So I had to scan each document in parts and then stitch them together afterwards.

There is lots of software available for stitching together photos into a panorama, but surprisingly, I had trouble finding software for stitching together flat images (or for creating a "linear panorama" as some people call it) even though this task would supposedly be a little bit easier than making panoramas. Of course, it's possible to manually load up the images into a paint program and manually align them and blend them, but I had to stitch together a lot of documents, so this was too time-consuming for me.

In the past, I've used software like Hugin, Panotools, or Autostitch for stitching together photos, but I could never quite get the various tutorials on how to handle linear panoramas to work quite right.

I own a copy of Photoshop Elements 6.0, which does contain algorithms for this sort of stitching (under File...New...Photomerge Panorama). Initially, I was quite pleased with the results, but after inspecting the final stitched images more carefully, I began to realize that the algorithm had lots of problems rotating images in order to get good alignment between them. If you only superficially inspect the final result, everything seems fine because Adobe seems to use some sort of fancy blending algorithm (something like Enblend) that hides a lot of these imperfections. Unfortunately, the blending algorithm can't hide the fact that because of poor alignment, lines that should be straight aren't. Even when you manually rotate the images to help the alignment algorithm, Photoshop Elements doesn't help you try to fine-tune the rotation or positioning afterwards, so it's hard to get things aligned quite right (I was hoping that if I could get things close to alignment, the algorithm would "snap" things to the best position). Adobe is always tweaking their algorithms, so it's possible that later versions of Photoshop Elements give better results though.

In the end, I actually found a research tool from Microsoft that provided excellent automated results. Even better, Microsoft's Image Composition Editor was very fast and very easy to use, so I highly recommend this program. Eventually, I hope to figure out what I was doing wrong with Hugin because it's always useful to have an alternative that supports a lot of manual tweaking, but so far the results of the Image Composition Editor have been so good that I've only needed to resort to alternate tools (i.e. Adobe Photoshop Elements) only once, which occurred when I was stitching four images together that had only a small amount of overlap.