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I want to affix a camera to my bike or car, perpendicular to my direction of travel, and produce one long image of the landscape as I pass. I think a slitscan or linescan process is needed. How would one go about this? end goal is to be able to print the image as it is being taken, but am content with first learning where to start.

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    \$\begingroup\$ You take standard images at regular intervals and stitch them as a "parallel motion panorama" \$\endgroup\$
    – xenoid
    Commented Nov 9 at 10:22
  • \$\begingroup\$ Slit scan is more for separating the passage of time from one side to the other. All focal plane shutters are "slit scan" when exposure times shorter than the transit time of the shutter curtains across the sensor are used, though most focal plane shutters these days (as well as pretty much every digital sensor's electronic shutter) scan vertically instead of horizontally like focal plane shutters in many film cameras once did. \$\endgroup\$
    – Michael C
    Commented Nov 9 at 11:32
  • \$\begingroup\$ Are you seeking to have a perfectly orthogonal view of the scene 90° from your direction of travel? \$\endgroup\$
    – Michael C
    Commented Nov 9 at 11:34
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    \$\begingroup\$ What is the duration of travel you want to represent? 10 seconds, 10 minutes, 10 hours? \$\endgroup\$
    – scottbb ♦
    Commented Nov 9 at 18:19
  • \$\begingroup\$ What have you tried? Have you tried any of the various "slit scan" type apps for iOS or Android to get an idea of how they work vs. what you expect? As asked, this is a very open-ended question. You have an idea in mind, but appear to have done no hands-on work. \$\endgroup\$
    – scottbb ♦
    Commented Nov 9 at 18:38

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It is unlikely to produce a result usable for a print. Try taking a single photo from a moving vehicle and you will see that is extremely difficult. The travel motion causes blur in the direction of motion, road imperfections and, on a bike, your own movement, will cause blur in other directions. Even a fast shutter-speed will show blur for typical vehicle speed. Add to that the need to have your subject in focus and it gets less likely. You can preset the camera to a set distance but need to use a narrow aperture to account for changing distance.

Usually when shooting from a moving vehicle you need to take tens if not hundreds of shots to get just a few that are acceptable, so I don't think it would be possible to have enough of them consistent to get a continuous set of images that can be stitched.

The only suggestion that could help is to record video at a high frame-rate which will be like shooting images at 60+ FPS. Then you could try to extract slices of frames that are acceptably sharp into a panoramic image. I do not know of a software to do this and you would need to be recording at at least 4K to have enough resolution for printing, so this is a long shot as they say.

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