[Image-SIG] Intelligent bracketing

[Frédéric]

Hello,

I'm starting a funny project (at least, part of a project): intelligent 
bracketing.

Many DSLR have a auto bracketing mode, where you can automatically shoot 
additionnal pictures arround the current exposure. But usually, it is 
limited (3 shots, no more than +-2EV), except for high-end DSLR.

Anyway, even with a full auto bracketing mode, it is not always possible to 
get the complete dynamic of a scene. And it is especially true when 
shooting panoramic pictures, which is my goal, as there are very large 
differences between one side to another (shooting a full-spehrical pano 
always implies to shoot towards the sun).

The idea of intelligent bracketing is to take a first shot, analyse it, and 
take additionnal shots with an exposure bias: each new shot is based on 
the result of the previous one. So, we need to analyse the images (mainly 
histogram, which is easily done with PIL) to determine the next exposure 
bias. This is where I need some help; I'm far from a maths guru ;o)

If you have some papers which can help, or some personnal knowledge, feel 
free to contact me, or to give some usefull tips.

Thanks for reading.

PS : about the complete project: it is a panohead control software, to 
automatically takes panoramic pictures, using a motorized panohead (in 
fact, a low cost astronomic mount). The software is called Papywizard, and 
can be found here:

    http://trac.gbiloba.org/papywizard

It is developed with the help of Kolor, a french company selling the famous 
Autopano Pro software, but Papywizard is released under a free license.

-- 
    Frédéric

    http://www.gbiloba.org