Image Stiching with Microsoft ICE 2

[tmbinc]

I'm trying to stitch together Thermal image pictures. I'd like to stitch the raw (14-bit/16-bit) files, not downmapped 8-bit image, produce a 16-bit stitched image, and then do mapping on that.

Microsoft's Image Composite Editor can do 16-bit processing, so hey - I generated .TIFF files with 16-bit, and it's supposed to calculate as 16-bit. Sometimes this works - when i export the panorama as TIFF, I get a 16-bit TIFF. But most of the time, it silently drops it back to 8-bit which is a pity. Anecdotal it worked when the camera mode was "pan" instead of "rotate" but i don't think it's really related. The official forum unfortunately is dead and all people who were publicly associated with the tool have left Microsoft and now work for Facebook apparently .

Has anyone successfully used ICE for this and can tell me the magic incantation?

[tmbinc]

Here's a patch that fixes it. Works for 2.0.3.0, 64-bit.

Verify first if your SHA-256 sum matches:

9f9f2ab674d2235ed94430ddad2df001ad912b6827a87b0d13a921f9bd847293  StitchEngine.DLL

Then, apply the following patch:

001C3786: 18 -> 1D

After that, you should be able to stitch 16-bit PNGs without losing dynamic range.