[ptx] Thoughts on autopano and nona

[HaJo Schatz]

Some, maybe simple-minded, thoughts I recently came up with after
stitching quite a few panos in a row:

Most of my panos feature landscapes, usually having sky with clouds at the
top. Seems that autopano loves to find matches in clouds - something which
is probably not a good idea, especially at windy days. For landscapes,
wouldn't it make sense to prioritize points in the vertical middle of the
image, thinking that both moving clouds and features at the bottom
(usually close-by, assuming hand-held shooting) should be avoided? Maybe
this could be overridden by a cmd-line switch for multi-row panos (which I
guess the average user doesn't make many of) and non-landscapes. For
non-landscapes, I guess that most people will anyhow use a panohead, and
then I assume it doesn't really matter that much where the points are
located.

And then there are these pedestrians which always just wait for me to
shoot and then they start running around! Quite frequently, however, I
have them on a clean shot on one picture, while they completely
disappeared on the next. It now appears that nona _loves_ to put the seam
right through such a moving target, cutting it into half. It seems that a
lot of information is, due to overlap, available twice. Couldn't nona
support a "preferred picture" where eg I could say "picture 2 has
precedence over picture 3 for the redundant area" or vice versa. That way,
I could possibly control whether the pedestrian is fully visible or gone.

Other than that, as always, all thumbs up!