Parallax Errors in the Panoramas

If you look carefully at the panoramas from the exhibit cameras, you can find errors in the panoramas. There are places where the pictures to not fit together properly. The panorama below contains an extreme example, a person on the right with a missing head, and one on the left with two left feet.

This is a problem caused by parallax errors in the six starting images.

To completely eliminate parallax errors, you must rotate your camera around the "nodal point" of the lens. The nodal point is also called the entrance pupil of the lens.

Many of the panoramas of downtown San Jose shown on this site were made from hand-held shots. Like the shots from the cameras in the exhibit, in some cases there are parallax errors in the objects close to the camera. These usually appear as lines in the pavement that fail to converge properly.

The Cause of the Parallax Errors

In the case of the exhibit at the Tech, the problem is that the pictures come from six separate cameras. The cameras are mounted on a hexagonal platform in the kiosk, and the distance between the center of the kiosk and the nodal points of the lenses means that the center of rotation is substantially behind the nodal point. This results in considerable parallax error which cannot be corrected in software.