[ptx] Software Overview Requested

[Mike Runge]

Ok,
here's the story, as far as I understood it.

Pano Tools:
basically contains:
- pano12.dll (routines needed by pano tools) There are different ones,
e.g the Fulvio Senore maintaines one optimized for speed.
- PTOptimiser Used by frontends like hugin to optimize/find out the right
parameters for position and transform of the single images based on the
controlpoints you define.
- PTStitcher (stitching engine) Once PTOptimiser has calculated the right
parameters and has written it into a script (ASCII file), PTStitcher can
merge thie single images together to one large panorama. For that
purpose PTStitcher is projecting the images on a cylinder, surface or
sphere following the parameters for postion and transform.

>> Hugin - An open source GUI for Panorma Tools.  Serves the same basic
>> purpose as PTGui.

That right.

Nona - another stitching engine, alternative to PTStitcher, comes with
the hugin package.

>> Autopano - A program for automatically locating control points in a
>> series of images to be stitched into a single panorama.

Yes. Output of running autopano standalone is a scriptfile (projectfile,
e.g. .pto for hugin). Can be run directly from within hugin (or PTGui)
and creates then just new controlpoints for a selection of images.

>> Autopano-sift - I'm not sure what this is or how it differs from
>> autopano.  Is this just a GUI for autopano?  Help appreciated.
>
>another implmentation of autpano but in C#

Yes, the main difference at the moment is, that the last autopano-sift
tries to spread the found controlpoints in an 'ideal' manner, whether
autopano just takes the 'best matching' points.

>> Enblend - A program which uses a different (better?) algorithm for
>> stitching images together into a panorama.  Basically, it's an
>> alternative to PTStitcher.  (As far as I know, enblend can't stitch
>> 16-bit images yet.)
>
>no, it's helpfull when you have already fix poitions of the diffrent images of 
>your panorama but that you want to get rid of vignetting problem that does 
>sometimes let dark lines near the edges of each photos...
>
Yes, it's 'just' blending single images to one as seamless as possible
large one.
If you have perfect images (no vignetting, exposure is all the same,
light situation hasn't changed while shooting the images) you probably
don't need it and can directly stitch your panorama with PTSTitcher or
nona.
If not (most of the times), you need an additional step in between. Let
PTStitcher or nona do all the transforming and projecting work, but let
them put out a set of multiple images. Each of these images will only
contain a small part of the whole panorama - but already projected at
the right position. You can now puzzle them together by hand using gimp
or PS and do some blending manually (lot of work, blending can be very
difficult in some cases), or just hand these image sover to enblend.
Enblend will patch them as seamless as possible together.

>I think they all work on linux (as though I've never run autopano-sift because 
>it seems difficult to me because I'm very new to mono things...), on windows 
>(I don't know for enblend?). For macos X, I don't know but some dev people 
>are working on it in order to make it easier for standart level people..
>

All are available on linux and win, development is on linux. Hugin, and
enblend (xblend) work as well on MacOS. I don't know the actual status
of autopano(-sift). Pano tools should be available for Mac as well.

best, mike