Since the inception of digital photography and the ongoing advances in smartphone photographic technology even the most haphazard and ill-framed shot can end up looking like it was shot by a professional. Microsoft has just promised to make the amateur’s snaps even more appealing with its updated ICE 2.0 software, that will use computer vision techniques to meld multiple shots into one panoramic “masterpiece”.

While masterpiece may be going a little too far, with the new software – first created in 2008 and last updated in 2011 (1,200 downloads a day, according to Microsoft) – the new version will at the very least help create some pretty amazing pictures. Users can take a video of a scene and then stitch the frames together, which will complete the panorama. If you’ve been shooting a moving target, say a horse galloping through a field of freshly fallen snow, you can make it a “stroboscopic motion panorama”, where the result is the horse appearing many times in a trippy trail across the entire image. ICE 2.0 also has an “Automatic Image Completion” feature which fills in the missing pieces when the video has moved around too much. Other cool features include multiple lenses that can create fish-eye, spherical, orthographic and stereographic effects.

Maybe one the most impressive features of this new computational photography is the “small world” panorama (as seen in the photo of the Seattle cityscape) in which a 360 degree view can be captured.

The technology, which was created by Microsoft’s Interactive Visual Media Group, was not designed for the sole purpose of the consumer, but with the aim to developing other products such as Bing Maps and Photosynth photo-stitching. In an interview with CNET, Matt Uyttendaele, manager of Microsoft Research’s computational photography group, said “In reality, there’s a lot of work left to do going from a research prototype to a product our customers can use. Microsoft ICE, where we finish the technology to the point where people can download and use it, forces us to polish it up so product groups can take it from us.”

If you want to have a shot at creating a masterpiece, then you can download the software here. System requirements are 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista SP2, Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1.

Photo credit: Microsoft