Microsoft's Mobicast helps combine cell phone videos

According to a New Scientist article, Microsoft Egypt has developed a new software that stitches together mobile videos into a single video for live internet streaming. The videos has to be of the same scene (of course) and taken from multiple angles which can then be combined to get a wide screen view. The software is named Mobicast.

according to the article,

To compensate, the team’s system, called Mobicast, utilises two sets of software – one for their smartphones, which run the Windows Mobile operating system, and one for a server receiving the video streams. When two or more phones with the software start streaming video, they synchronise their clocks with the server, which then uses timestamps on the footage to align video frames in time. Then image-recognition technology gauges how footage physically overlaps: features such as edges and corners are used to find areas that match, before the images are blended to create a wider view of the scene. The method used and end result are much like those of software that stitches multiple photos of, say, a landscape, into a larger image.

Even though it is very difficult to do this process in real time, the low quality and frame rate of the mobile phone videos makes it possible. Mobicast when released, will use GPS for locating the position of the users recording the same event. Thus it can be useful in case of a breaking new event, when lot of people will be shooting videos with their mobile which can be streamed online instantly thanks to mobicast.

Watch mobicast in action in the below video