PanoVolo is making drone panorama photos even better

Drone panorama image stitching platform PanoVolo has introduced a new feature called “Fill Sky” to tackle a long-standing challenge associated with 360-degree aerial panoramas. The feature comes as part of Panovolo’s latest software update, v1.7.0.

360-degree drone panoramas have become a popular method for capturing immersive, sweeping views of landscapes. By stitching together multiple aerial photographs, drones can create a seamless spherical image, offering viewers a complete perspective from a bird’s eye view. These panoramas are widely used in various fields, from social media and real estate to tourism and filmmaking. However, creating a flawless 360-degree panorama comes with its own set of challenges.

One of the most persistent issues in producing 360-degree drone panoramas is the presence of unsightly gaps or distortions, particularly in the sky. These imperfections occur due to the difficulty in aligning images captured at varying angles, especially when dealing with changing weather conditions or lighting variations. Traditional stitching methods often struggle with accurately blending these sky portions, leading to visible seams and inconsistent coloration, which detract from the overall visual appeal.

This is where Panovolo’s “Fill Sky” feature comes in to intelligently analyze the sky portion of the panorama and fill in gaps or inconsistencies with remarkable accuracy. By employing advanced algorithms, “Fill Sky” ensures a smooth and natural-looking sky, enhancing the overall quality and aesthetic of the panoramic image, as you can see in the example below:

Here are the complete release notes of PanoVolo v1.7.0:

• The Fill sky option fills the gap in zenith when panoramas are fully spherical (360×180 deg)
• The Fill sky is also available in the batch mode
• Read gimbal metadata from DJI Osmo Pocket cameras and apply them in panorama stitching
• More robust determination of the maximum texture size that the GPU supports
• Detect if the gimbal metadata saved by the drone is wrong or unreliable and warn the user
• If gimbal metadata is unusable, fall back to the image feature-based stitching algorithm
• Added the ability to stitch panoramas from clusters of disconnected images, with added warning to the user
• Added the information when the .pan (panorama settings file) is found and applied to the panorama
• Fixed status not showing correctly at the end of batch processing
• Localized UI into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ukrainian

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