Erratic Stitching Behavior by Mavic 3. Solutions?

[MS Coast]

I've just shot several 360-degree panoramas with the Mavic 3 and the quality of the stitching varies from essentially flawless to downright awful. The wind was consistently calm, less than 5 kts, No nearby structures or terrain that might have created turbulence. Bright sun with widely scattered cumulus and broken higher clouds. Auto exposure, no bias. Stills shot on auto were running 1/3200, f2.8, ISO 100.

I've included a screen capture from the worst stitching of the bunch. Other panoramas shot before and after this one have no readily discernable stitching flaws. Several others had smaller problems than this example.

Have others seen this flawless-to-awful variation in the auto stitching output? And suggestions for causes or remedies?

Thanks.

(I'm aware that better panoramas can be produced by shooting stills and stitching them with Photoshop, Lightroom, etc.)

 

[CanadaDrone]

On-device panorama capture is always the worst possible way to go about it, whether that be a drone, camera, or smartphone. You're also left with an 8bit JPEG which you can't really do much with. That is the price of convenience in this particular case. Sometimes it works OK, sometimes it doesn't, but in either case it will never be as good as if you take the RAW files into a standalone program.

The M3 has an option to record the individual RAW files for the panorama, and your best bet is always to take those files into a program like Photoshop or PTGui or whatever you like to use for your panoramas. If you don't do that, you are at the mercy of unreliable, low quality stitching and depending on your settings, no way to fix it. You seem to already be aware of this and have basically answered your own question

In my experience, I've never had any device, drone or otherwise, that will do a reliable panorama stich in-device. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not. Also keep in mind everyone is going to have a different threshold for "acceptable".

 

[MS Coast]

On-device panorama capture is always the worst possible way to go about it, whether that be a drone, camera, or smartphone. You're also left with an 8bit JPEG which you can't really do much with. That is the price of convenience in this particular case. Sometimes it works OK, sometimes it doesn't, but in either case it will never be as good as if you take the RAW files into a standalone program.

The M3 has an option to record the individual RAW files for the panorama, and your best bet is always to take those files into a program like Photoshop or PTGui or whatever you like to use for your panoramas. If you don't do that, you are at the mercy of unreliable, low quality stitching and depending on your settings, no way to fix it. You seem to already be aware of this and have basically answered your own question

In my experience, I've never had any device, drone or otherwise, that will do a reliable panorama stich in-device. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not. Also keep in mind everyone is going to have a different threshold for "acceptable".

I should have mentioned that the stitching alignment problems I'm seeing with the Mavic 3 are far worse than what I've seen with the Air 2S, Mini 2, or Mini 3.

The auto 360-panos from the other models have almost always been pretty good, with few instances of obvious discontinuities on the horizon and features like roads, bridges, railroads, and such. And I don't recall ever seeing any alignment problems as bad as that Mavic 3 example I posted.

There are lots of applications where "snapshot" quality 360 panos from the DJI drones are perfectly acceptable. A couple of months ago I shot a couple of dozen 360s for a nature center in Georgia that wanted them for use on the web and on show-and-tell computers in their office and visitor area. Manual stitching was not an option, because of the time required and the need to deliver something the same day. 100% of what I shot with the Air 2S were keepers with no glaring stitching alignment issues.

I'm wondering why the Mavic 3 doesn't provide the consistency in stitch alignment that I've seen with other DJI models.

 

[CanadaDrone]

I should have mentioned that the stitching alignment problems I'm seeing with the Mavic 3 are far worse than what I've seen with the Air 2S, Mini 2, or Mini 3.

The auto 360-panos from the other models have almost always been pretty good, with few instances of obvious discontinuities on the horizon and features like roads, bridges, railroads, and such. And I don't recall ever seeing any alignment problems as bad as that Mavic 3 example I posted.

There are lots of applications where "snapshot" quality 360 panos from the DJI drones are perfectly acceptable. A couple of months ago I shot a couple of dozen 360s for a nature center in Georgia that wanted them for use on the web and on show-and-tell computers in their office and visitor area. Manual stitching was not an option, because of the time required and the need to deliver something the same day. 100% of what I shot with the Air 2S were keepers with no glaring stitching alignment issues.

I'm wondering why the Mavic 3 doesn't provide the consistency in stitch alignment that I've seen with other DJI models.

All I can tell you for sure is that my M2P doesn't do a good enough job either, at least for my standards (which admittedly are very high). Neither does my smartphone (Galaxy S22 Ultra), or any camera I've ever owned, so I still do everything manually in every case. No matter what, the best results are going to come from a manual process. Hopefully some others can comment if they are in fact somehow getting perfect results with a M3.

 

[Lister]

The example shown by the OP is a difficult stitch. No details to work with.
I'm not surprised that it failed.

Everything CanadaDrone says is true. No aircraft can do as good a job as a dedicated software stitching tool. Thank goodness DJI lets us keep the original DNGs.

 

[edcMavicPilots]

On-device panorama capture is always the worst possible way to go about it, whether that be a drone, camera, or smartphone. You're also left with an 8bit JPEG which you can't really do much with. That is the price of convenience in this particular case. Sometimes it works OK, sometimes it doesn't, but in either case it will never be as good as if you take the RAW files into a standalone program.

The M3 has an option to record the individual RAW files for the panorama, and your best bet is always to take those files into a program like Photoshop or PTGui or whatever you like to use for your panoramas. If you don't do that, you are at the mercy of unreliable, low quality stitching and depending on your settings, no way to fix it. You seem to already be aware of this and have basically answered your own question

In my experience, I've never had any device, drone or otherwise, that will do a reliable panorama stich in-device. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not. Also keep in mind everyone is going to have a different threshold for "acceptable".

I agree with you but I haven't gotten any good Mavic 3 stitches from DNG with PTGui, Camera Raw or Capture One Pro. There is always a huge gap. The in drone stitching does work reasonably well in my experience.

 

[Meta4]

I've included a screen capture from the worst stitching of the bunch. Other panoramas shot before and after this one have no readily discernable stitching flaws. Several others had smaller problems than this example.

Even the best stitching software will have problems with a shot like that.
You need clear identifiable features and points for the software to match between adjacent images.
Water is the worst thing to match and most of the images are water, the sky is only slightly better.
When the images have recognisable detail that can be matched, results will be much better..

 

[MS Coast]

Even the best stitching software will have problems with a shot like that.
You need clear identifiable features and points for the software to match between adjacent images.
Water is the worst thing to match and most of the images are water, the sky is only slightly better.
When the images have recognisable detail that can be matched, results will be much better..

I agree. Looking back at the shots where there have been stitching issues, I see that large expanses of water definitely create challenges for stitching. I'd have thought that the algorithm would give more weight to horizons and other long, contrasted lines, since they're so significant to viewers of the image.

Here's an example where there's a large expanse of water with little detail but well defined, high contrast shapes that aren't handled well.

It appears that the conclusion is that manual stitching is called for with images dominated by water.

(When the weather settles, I'll shoot the same scene with the Air 2s for comparison.)

Full 360 pano, flat


Detail at horizon


Detail, directly below

 

[edcMavicPilots]

I have used PTGui for a few stitches lately and it has been working well for the most part. There is a problem in high contrast light, e.g. sunrise/sunset. To make sure the sky isn't blown out whatever is underneath is typically pretty dark and won't autostitch.

 

[MS Coast]

All those panoramas worked out fine when I stitched the composite images together with Microsoft's Image Composite Editor. I hear that PTGui is even better.

I understand now that an image that's largely water poses a real challenge for stitching, especially when the water has waves and ripples that are not in the same place in each image. That should have been more logically obvious to me. I'd thought that the algorithm used for the stitching would pay particular attention to high-contrast junctions like the horizon, but that's apparently outweighed by all the rest of the image.

If anyone needs an excellent software utility for viewing panoramas locally on a computer, I stumbled across this one a few days ago in the archives of this forum. It has a very nice user interface, useful features accessible with keyboard shortcuts, and a nice feature for exporting flat images

PanGazer - a new application for viewing Mavic Panoramas

I've been working for a few months now on a new viewer for panoramas I've been taking on my Mavic Pro. It is now available at PanGazer - introduction. Here's a summary of the main features: PanGazer is a free (and advert-free) Windows application for viewing images and panoramas, including...

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