Genealogy and Microsoft ICE

Normally I write about the various resources, paper and digital, and processes that I make use of when I try to solve a problem in my genealogy and family history research. Today's post is a little bit different. I'm writing about a piece of software that I have found to be invaluable in dealing with digitized images: Microsoft Image Composite Editor or ICE. For those that don't have a Microsoft Windows based system, unfortunately this tool won't help you out since it is for Windows 64-bit and 32-bit systems only. And if you like to spend money in your genealogy research then I have to disappoint you. ICE is free. Yes, you read that correctly, this is a FREE although unsupported product from Microsoft.

So just what is this tool and why do I find it so useful?

From the Microsoft page for their Image Composite Editor, where you can also download the installation package, they describe the product as:

"Image Composite Editor (ICE) is an advanced panoramic image stitcher created by the Microsoft Research Computational Photography Group. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location, the app creates high-resolution panoramas that seamlessly combine original images. ICE can also create panoramas from a panning video, including stop-motion action overlaid on the background. Finished panoramas can be saved in a wide variety of image formats, including JPEG, TIFF, and Photoshop’s PSD/PSB format, as well as the multiresolution tiled format used by HD View and Deep Zoom."

So how does this apply to my genealogy research?

Many of the probate files and land records have documents that are so big that you can't fit the whole image of the page on the screen of the microfilm reader. If you are doing your transcriptions right then and there you probably have no issues but what if you want to save an image of the page for either later transcribing or for archive purposes on your computer. You need to take several partial pictures of the page to capture everything and somehow stitch them together into one page later on.

Wouldn't it be nice to take the images of those pages and stitch them together to create a single page?

Before	After

Just a second...stitch them together? That's in the description of ICE! Keep in mind that even though a panorama is thought of as a horizontal picture ICE can also do the same to vertical images.

Before we begin here are a few key things to keep in mind:

• The images that you have must have some overlap. The more the better (20% seems to work well) but I have worked with images with only 10% overlap.
• Whenever possible save your original images from the microfilm reader as TIF. This format can create very large files but all the quality is preserved.
• Try to save the images from the microfilm reader with a name that make some sense and flags that the image file is just one of several. I usually save the image file with a letter after the page number. For example, 03a and 03b are the parts of page 3 that I need to reassemble with ICE.

ICE is easy to use but I'll walk through a simple stitching together of two images into a single page.

Here I have started a new Image Composite Editor session by importing the two parts of page 15 from the estate file of Abraham Hoover, dated 30 Sep 1831, from the Lincoln County (Ontario, Canada) Surrogate Court Estate Files (1794-1859) found on the Archives of Ontario microfilm MS-8411. These are the two images from the "Before" above.

I don't do anything fancy and just leave it as a "Simple Panorama" on the import screen.

Next I click on the Stitch button and let the computer do its magic. If all works well a single page is created and displayed on the screen.

If all looks good it is on to step 3, "Crop". ICE shows what it believes the image should be cropped. But you can adjust the boundaries as you see fit.

In this case, I got rid of a bit of the black on the top and side and also the bit at the bottom from the next page.

Finally we can save the image by clicking on the "Export" button at the top. If the images were originally as TIF files, I will always export the final image as a "TIFF Image". If you want to save it as a JPEG image make sure you select "Superb" for the image quality. Once you have selected the file format to use click on the the "Export to disk" button and give the new image file a name. In my case it will be "15.tif" since it is a combination of the images 15a and 15b.

Depending on how you work, and of course after verifying that the resulting image is correct, you can now delete the original image files, 15a.tif and 15b.tif in this case.

This tool may also help stitch together those multi-page passenger lists that you find on Ancestry, Findmypast, and other genealogy sites. But it will all depend on how much overlap exists between the pages. Your mileage may vary.

Hopefully this piece of free software will help you in your genealogy research challenges as you hunt down and save to your computer those crucial documents that help you break through the annoying brick walls.