initial beta release of hugin (a opensource, cross platform PT GUI)

[Pablo d'Angelo]

Hi together,

We have just released the first beta version of hugin, a opensource,
cross platfrom GUI for Panorama Tools.

Get it at http://hugin.sf.net

It's design is similar to the other interfaces to Pano Tools, I think
that should be useable for users that have used Pano Tools before.

Please give it a try and tell me what you think about it.

Some words about the control point selection process:
I like to work with "zoomed to fit screen" images, instead of scrolling
a small window through the huge image. Therefore hugin supports this
mode with the following procedure:

if working with zoomed out images, the first click zooms to 100%.
 there one can change the first point to a better position,
 or go to the second window.

then click on the second point (in zoomed out view).
if auto fine tune is on:
  if a good match is found, point is added.
if auto fine tune is off:
  the first click zooms in, but doesn't create a control point yet.
  the second click selects a point.

if "auto add" is off, a control point is added to the panorama with the
right mouse button. Pressing the right mouse button with only one point
resets the view to the full image.

The fine tune button tries to find an optimal position of the right
point.

I still have to add position estimation and remapping of the template
into the output projection (like in PTGui) , to make the fine tune useable
for multi-row panorams and fisheye input images.
For my images (hfov < 50), the finetune works quite well, even if
exposure or focus differences are present. I usually get a maximal control
point error < 2 on panos with more than 10 images.


The long term goal is to introduce an automatic image registration
algorithm, either on the back of PanoTools (feature based) or maybe a
frequency domain approach.
Some time ago people where talking about this topic. I hope that hugin
provides an open platform for this functionality. Edward Wildgoos,
are you still interested in implementing an automatic registration algo for
the pano tools suite?

Currently it is available for linux and windows. Theoretically it should
be possible create a mac version of it, but I don't have access to one.
If a developer on mac wants to contribute, please let me know.

ciao
  Pablo
--
http://wurm.wohnheim.uni-ulm.de/~redman/
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