[ptx] Re: hugin snapshot

[Rik Littlefield]

Marek,

What optimization mode are you using in hugin? 

There is a known problem with pairwise optimization, due to hugin's 
making direct calls into pano12 and overriding some pano12 methods that 
changed between Max Lyon's version and the current version 2.7.0.6.  
Pairwise optimization gives the appearance of working right, but I can 
see from debug printouts that internally there are mismatched calls.  
The other optimization modes go through the PToptimizer utility and 
should see the same behavior as all other users of the new optimizer.

The new optimizer has been wrung out pretty thoroughly by this point, 
not only by hugin but also by many users of PTgui and PTAssembler as 
discussed on the PanoTools forum.  Generally it is reported to be much 
faster and equally or more robust.  It is particularly good at not 
getting "stuck in the noise" tweaking parameters but not actually making 
progress. 

However, there definitely are cases where the new optimizer converges to 
strange parameter values, where the old one did not.  From my standpoint 
as the guy who did the optimizer mod, what makes those cases vexing is 
that the strange parameter values usually turn out to be "better" in the 
sense of fitting the specified control points with less error, although 
elsewhere in the image, away from the control points, the fit is worse.  
Eventually reports of such problems died down.  I don't know why.  
Adding more control points tends to make this problem go away, so 
increased use of autopano might have been a factor.

--Rik

spec wrote:

> Pablo dAngelo wrote:
>
>>> BTW Max Lyons' version is the best - there's something wrong with 
>>> the version from panotools.sf.net - the optimizer is doing really 
>>> bad job comparing with the one from Max, and I didn't see any speed 
>>> gain.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Really? I've been using the newer panotools version since a long 
>> time, and
>> it's really a lot faster, and can optimize the HFOV for partial 
>> pano's as well
>> (most of the time). It usually takes only a small number of iterations,
>> usually < 20.
>>
>> Can you post an example where the this happens?
>>  
>>
> I'll try to find something - Just yesterday optimizer had a problem 
> positioning images and when I switched to Max Lyons' dll all the 
> problems went away. I'll post something when it occurs again.
>
> As far as the installer program in dev-c++ we use nsis.sourceforge.net.
>
> -- 
> Marek
>
>