[ptx] Enblend Multiresolution Spline Blender

[JD Smith]

On Sat, 2004-03-06 at 13:51, Andrew C Mihal wrote:
> Hi,
>     I'm announcing the first release of my multiresolution spline blender.
> 
> http://www-cad.eecs.berkeley.edu/~mihal/enblend/
> 
> After using Hugin to stitch together your panoramas, often there are still 
> photometric differences between images that lead to ugly seams in the 
> result. Enblend blends away these seams using a multiresolution spline.
> 
> I mentioned this technique on this list last week. Enblend improves on the 
> old pyrmask program in four ways:
> 
>  - Automatic mask calculation.
>  - Proper handling of the alpha channel.
>  - Direct support for TIFF files produced by Hugin.
>  - Pre-assembly of non-overlapping images before blending.
> 
> Check it out. There are some demonstration images on the web page above.

Looks great Andrew. 

It might be a very good idea to incorporate into or chain enblend to
nona, Hugin's fast PTStitcher replacement, which itself has no seaming
capabilities.  Then we can let Helmut's libpano do the work it's best
at: optimizing image position, projecting coordinates, and interpolating
the result, and let enblend handle the seaming, all from the convenient
interface of hugin.  

As Ed mentions, this would probably be most effective and efficient on
multi-layer TIFFs.  If possible (and it may not be), an option to just
update the alpha masks (and image planes?) within the TIFFm would also
be very useful, for those situations when some final post-processing and
hand tweaking to remove duplicates (person walking through scene, etc.)
is necessary.

Thanks!

JD