Nat. Methods 9, 735–742 (2012); published online 17 June 2012; corrected after print 9 July 2012.

In the version of this article initially published, two items in the Online Methods section were incorrect. The MATLAB code in the 'ViBE-Z database file' section contained an extraneous semicolon, which appeared in the HTML only and has been corrected. In the section 'Stitching and dorsal-ventral alignment', two formulas had a 'mapsto' symbol instead of an arrow. These errors have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.