SW to create digital map from a paper map/ stitching SW

Hi,

I suppose the problem is well known - you have a quite good local paper map
and would like to make one digital map out of it but your scanner is by far
smaller than your map. So you have to scan the map in pieces and stitch the
parts to a big digital file of the map. This file you can calibrate in the
next step...



I plan to use these maps for pre-planning of hiking and biking and upload
pre-planned tracks to my GPSmap60cs.



I know that's really no rocket science and I also did this before with the
demo version of the ImageAssembler from PanaVue 4 year ago when I relocated
to China with the best local paper map available what worked good for
years... .



Now back in Europe I tried this with my old bicycling maps from Germany and
the latest demo version from PanaVue. The result (now with auto stitching)
was even better but to my surprise you now can only store the final map in
grayscale what removes a lot of important color information (e.g. type of
paving, different level of hiking or bike trails...) from the map. As I do
not have neither the installation nor the installation file of the old
ImageAssembler I started looking for a stitching tool in these NG and in
Google but could not find a satisfying tool for maps (either auto stitching
did not work correctly, only for pictures taken by a cam (focal distances),
manual stitching interface was scrap, limitation of sub-map-tiles (e.g. 3 x
3), ...).



So I would like to ask you for advice. Could you pls. recommend me a SW tool
to make one big digital map file with a scanner which:

- supports stitching of FLAT map-tiles (with overlap)

- saves the final map in color

- no limitation of the map-tiles. (I need ~5 row x ~25 column)

- manual stitching with an userfriendly UI ok but automatic stitching
preferred.

- demo version or freeware

- I'm fine with watermarks

- I'm fine with limited but non-proprietary file formats you can convert
(e.g. only bmp, ...)



In the first step I'm looking for a freeware/demo tool which supports this.
If there is non available I have to consider spending some bugs but for
which SW...?



Sorry, if I'm a little bit behind regarding tooling but due to the lack of
detailed maps and vector maps for my region I once decided for a tool chain,
got a working solution and did not follow up theses NGs in the last years
but since I'm back I focus on Europe/Germany and found out that a lot of
easy to use and well documented public vecor maps, hiking, bicycling and
skating tracks are available on the web so I started to catch up...



Thanks for your help in advance!



Claus

wrote:

Something I've used in the past is Image Arithmetic.

http://www.t3i.nl/myblog/?page_id=7

BobC