[ptx] hugin 0.5 beta2

[Mike Runge]

Hi Doug,

you'll wish, you havn't asked ;-)

>> > Nice work Pablo,
>> > it's still fun to work with hugin. Are you open
>> for enhancement requests?
>
>What are you looking for?

First of all, I try to describe my current method to stitch a sphercal
image based on 7 images taken with a fisheye lens to make it more
understandable, what I'm looking for.

===========================================================================
Usecase:
My method to create a spherical panorama goes like this:
- loading 6 images (4 at pitch==0 (from tripod), one zenith (from
tripod), one nadir(from tripod))
- arranging the anchor image with verticals
- optimising the anchor image

- placing all points for the 4 images at the middle (e.g autopano)
- optimising the 'middle ring' (the 3 images for the middle, not the
anchor)
- re-optimize all 4 images of the 'middle ring'
- a quick stitch (small jpg) of the 4 images to see if the middle ring
has any problems
  This means, I remove the last 2 images, do the stitch and then do UNDO
to get the 3 images back.

- adding controlpoints for zenith
- optimising zenith only

- adding controlpoints for tripod-nadir
- optimizing tripod nadir only
- optimizing all 6 images together
- stitching all 6 images as high quality multiple tiffs

- removing all images except the nadir
- adding an additional nadir image taken freehand (new lens)
- adding controllpoints between the 2 images
- optimizing the freehand nadir only
- stitching the freehand-nadir only as multiple tiff
  this means removing tripod-nadir, stitch, UNDO to get the tripod-nadir
back in.
============================================================================

So, here are my wishes to optimise this workflow :-)
#1
It would be helpful for some methods to tell hugin what images in the
project should be included/excluded while running the optimiser or the
stitcher. Here is an idea to archive this:
- a checkmark in front of each image line in the images tab or reading
the selected images from preview
- While running the optimizer or stitcher, hugin would only use the
selected images and it's corresponding controlpoints.
- If only a single image would be selected, hugin would only optimize
this image by using it's horizontal/vertical controlpints disregarding
all other points.
- If 2 or more images are selected, hugin would disregard all
non-selected images and controlpoints, that correspond with this images.
Hugin also would use the selected images for stitching.

This would allow me to load all 7 images at the beginning of the project,
run autopano once and follow my method without any removing of images
and without any predefined sequence of controlpoint creation. It would
much more helpful on large multirows, where I reach best results
optimising one row after an other instead of all together.

#2
I need to crop the black areas in fisheye images manually. This can be
done at a very first step or at the end based on the distorted
multirows. PTGUI has a method implemented to crop the black areas within
the tool. PTStitcher and nona can crop images - no idea how to tell them
how they should crop. As a first approach, I would think defining a
radius or diameter (maybe moving with x-y-shift) would be good enough.
Maybe the preview can show the crop?! As far as I understood Pablo, this
is one of the features he want's to implement next (he already bought a
Peleng fisheye ;-))

#3
autopano implementation is great!!!
Especially the possible to remove points between dedicated images. I
often misuse this to find out, if there are controlpoints between 2
images (Select 2 images in image tab, remove, popup tells me how many
images, discard). Can we use the #-row at the very right in images tab
to show, what other images are correspondig if only one image is
selectet?
Example:
a) all or none image selected in images Tab: # shows all controllpoints
(like it is now)
b) only image (e.g. image 0) one is selected: # shows only the number of
controlpoints corresponding with the selcted image. E.g. image 1 has 10
controllpoints at all, 5 with image 1 and 5 with image 6.
Is that understandable? I would prefer to show method b only on request
(e.g. Update, klick on #-button,). Otherwise it maybe would be slow
selecting one image after the other if looking for the small preview.

#4
Especially while stitching large multirows, the preview is very small,
because it's always centered. On large multirows I get a lot of black
and the interesting part of the image is very small. Is it possible to
include a kind of zoom-factor (1x,2x,4x,8x) and some scrollbars in the
preview? Selecting 1x and hitting Update would work like today, hitting
e.g. 4x and Update would use 4times the dimesions used in 1x to
calculate the new preview, the srollbars (or dragging with mb1/3 ) would
allow to move the preview.

Bugs (0.5beta, wxp):
- nona still has a bug on the 360-0 deg frontier - some part of the
images is missing there. I already reported this to Pablo and the list:
http://www.panoclub.de/gallery/360-deg-bug

- Running PTStitcher out of hugin on cropped circular fisheye images
taken in portrait mode and manually rotated is cropping the images at
the bottom and at the top. I already reported this to Pablo and the
list. http://www.panoclub.de/gallery/hugin_bug_ptstitcher

So the only method to do sphericals in hugin today is:
- loading circular images (taken in portrait mode) in landscape mode
- using PTStitcher
This works, but it's quite uncomfortable to pick controlpoints by hand
(you need to hold you head sideways).Maybe the controlpoints tab could
show the images rotated, according the roll-parameter?!

- new lens management works fine - thanks a lot. There is a new bug
reading exif information. Reading a photo of my old comsumer cam (Fuji
S602Z) worked fine before, but calculates a wrong v now. Clicking into
the crop factor filed first and then into the focal length field updates
v to the correct value. It seems, that there is some Update of the
values missing or so?! This can be very frustrating for new users. You
will not get appropriate results using the wrong v value and it's not
obvious for newbies, what went wrong. Screenshot:
http://www.panoclub.de/gallery/hugin_exif_load

Beneath all this:
It's fun to work with hugin and meanwhile, It's able to do all I really
need  and I'm getting famous results :-)

Nice work,
mike