[ptx] Hugin wishlist, RFC

[Sebastian Nowozin]

Hello everybody,

I just returned from my Beijing trip and have some cool panos with me ;) But
after some month of using hugin I always stumble about the same itches, and as
a request for comment want to put them here for discussion.
  As I have some time left until university starts again I am happy to program
or read up on any topic of the ones listed below to help programming.

This is my wishlist for hugin (top = most important)


1. Band blending (or some other intelligent blending)

   Even with setting every capture parameter at my camera to some fixed value,
I still end up having differently exposed images that hardly match up, even
with large feathering. Adjusting brightness kills the blue sky in most images,
adjust color paints them pink. Adjusting both does both.


2. Incremental optimization

   I think Pablo started this already, and it definetely will easy panorama
creation, especially for the beginners. This gets around the incremental manual
"position estimation", and successive optimization afterwards.


3. Automatic panorama control point creation

   Alexandre did a replacement to the keypoints binary (Alexandre: how far is
t? Can I help/review?). Though for now I am happy with my version, such a tool
shipping with hugin would be great. To be usable for everybody it must contain
some geometric matching code, though. The current matching is sufficient for
us, as we just get rid of the wrong control points after the first optimization
by deleting the worst ones, but a beginner might find this difficult. Also, it
must have some penalty function so that clustering of control points is purged
in favor of more spacious matches. (That is: the polygon area of all matching
control points should be large, not just a small cluster at some easy features)


4. "Horizon points"

   I find the idea of setting horizontal lines counter-intuitive. Maybe to
straighten the top of a gate or building, but to straighten the horizon I think
this is more intuitive: Allow the user to drop points where he expects the
horizon ("horizon points"). This points, of which there have to be at least 2
are used for two things: anchoring the height to 0 degrees, and creating
horizontal line control point pairs between them (invisible to the user). Most
people have a very good idea where the horizon is located, even if its
completely covered with buildings and trees and such (must be some evolutional
thing).


5. Unneccessary picture detection

   As I like to take panoramas just manually I sometimes lose the "map" of what
areas I already captured and capture more, just to be sure. This ends up in
bogus pictures, overlaying some other pictures, but they are of no real use.
They slow down optimization and panorama creation. Hugin could suggest such
pictures for removal.


6. "Camera profiles"

   My digicam (and I guess lots of others) use some screwed focal length (7.8mm
to 24mm something) being "equivalent" to some 38mm camera. For use with hugin I
have to use 38mm, but the EXIF information reads 7.8mm. I guess it would help
most users to use some kind of "camera profile", where they can specify one
time the focal length and later choose the camera profile to use, instead of
doing manual adjustment everytime they import pictures.


Thats basically it :) Please comment and point me to the right points or
previous work I can look at.


A small bug I noticed when creating .jpg pictures with hugin is that the suffix
".jpg" is capitalized to ".JPG" everytime. Is that a panotools fault or hugins?

ciao,
Sebastian

-- 
nowozin at cs.tu-berlin.de --- http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/