A single-line industrial camera, designed for scanning conveyor belts on assembly lines, is now producing some of the longest panoramic photographs on record. Builder Philo mounts the line-scan sensor to moving vehicles, including trains on railways and boats, and captures one vertical column of pixels at a time, stitching the columns into continuous panoramas as the vehicle travels.
The build evolved from a crude proof of concept: a smartphone balanced on a chair, rotated manually while software grabbed a single pixel column per frame. That worked well enough to justify sourcing real hardware. The industrial line-scan camera was the turning point. Philo added accelerometer data to compensate for vehicle vibration and developed custom stitching software to assemble the raw column data into coherent images. The wobble artifacts are visible, but the geometric scale of the resulting images is unlike anything a conventional rotating-lens panoramic camera produces.
Read the full project write-up for the software architecture behind the column-extraction pipeline and to see the actual output images, which are the real argument for why this approach matters. The next logical step is better motion compensation, and whether Philo pursues inertial measurement unit fusion or post-processing correction will determine how far the image quality can go.
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