How create panorama from aerial photography video

We rigged up a gopro on a cessna wing (pointing downwards) and filmed some forest. Now, I'd like to create an image of the entire video to see the full forest in one image.

I tried extracting frames with ffmpeg and using hugin, which after 5 hours of playing around in hugin i still cannot get anything decent (all these projections and lens settings have me lost). I've tried a few other software and they all end up being as much work as manually doing each image in gimp.

It seems to me by looking at the panorama feature on my android phone that this could be feasible directly from a video but google searching has got me stumped.

Has anyone done this? Is there prior art or software projects you know of that do this well? What would be your approach?

Solution 1:

At it's default settings, Hugin does a pretty good job stitching frames.

Another, simpler, tool in Windows is the Image Composite Editor, available from Archive.org - regrettably, Microsoft no longer supports this excellent tool, but it works well in Windows 10. It is able to import image frames from a video to make a panorama, as well as assemble an image from selected frames.

Note that unlike panoramas made by turning the camera around a fixed point, you're likely assembling the image from a linear series of frames, so perspective control must be set accordingly.