December 17th, 2011· Hugin now has a vertical feature detection tool for automatic levelling of panoramas. Besides, also many bugs have been fixed and many general improvements have been made.
· Vertical feature detection tool
· Often a panorama, created from several single photos, is not level. In this case the experienced user adds vertical and horizontal control points to level the panorama.
· With this release Hugin introduces a tool named linefind which automatically detects vertical features in the photos such as the edges of buildings and windows, and assigns vertical control points to them. This makes it easier than before to level a panorama, in most cases it works without any intervention.
Other Improvements:
· The Fast Preview window can now show composition guides such as Rule of Thirds and Golden ratio to support an easier composition of the final panorama.
· The output of High Dynamic Range (HDR) images has been modified to prevent clipping of the exposure in EXR format images. The previous versions of Hugin outputted HDR images with absolute exposure values, now with this 2011.4.0 release, Hugin uses relative exposure values. This means that the output Exposure Value (EV) of the panorama, which can be set in the preview window, has an influence on the HDR output (as already for normal LDR images) and should be set to the medium exposure value of the images. If you set the output exposure value to zero, the old behavior is restored.
The batch processor PTBatcherGUI has been extended:
· It is now possible to directly add unaligned projects to the assistant queue for aligning and control point generation.
· Successfully stitched projects can be automatically removed from the queue, this makes the queue management easier.
· If a project was successfully finished by the assistant, it can be automatically added to the stitching queue. This now allows for a fully automatic panorama creation workflow.
· Many more improvements and bug fixes.
September 30th, 2011Lens Calibration Tool:
· Lenses are designed to follow a perfect geometric model. For rectilinear lenses, a straight line in the depicted scene should be straight in the picture. This is not always the case: most lenses have an inherent deviation from the perfect model, resulting in imperfections such as pincushion or barrel distortion in rectilinear lenses.
· Adherence to the perfect geometric model is desirable for aesthetic purposes and indispensable to achieve proper alignment when stitching images. Hugin can calculate lens distortion parameters on the fly when optimizing a project, however this requires more control points and more computational effort than a project starting with a calibrated lens, and is prone to more errors.
· The new lens calibration tool calculates the distortion parameters of a lens based on an input image. The input image must contain straight lines, ideally many of them at different distances from the center of the lens, covering at least one quadrant of the image. The calculated parameters are valid for a given combination of focal distance, aperture (F-stop), and sensor.
· The values, saved into a lens profile, can be used in Hugin to achieve a better stitch, or on single images taken with this lens / settings combination to achieve a more aesthetically pleasing outcome.
Python Scripting Interface:
Hugin now exposes some of its data structure and functionalities through a Python module. To get started with scripting, start your Python interpreter and type:
· >>> import hsi
· >>> help (hsi)
· Standalone Python programs can access a panorama object with Hugin's functionality. It is possible to develop complete command line and even GUI tools based on this module.
Python Plugin Interface:
· Hugin can now run Python scripts inside the application. In an enabled Hugin binary, a new "Actions" menu gives access to system-wide plugins distributed with Hugin. Moreover, plugins can be written, modified, customized in the user's own directory.
· Currently there are only a few plugins available, but we expect the body of available plugins and functionality to grow organically as the interface is being made available to the general public.
Other Improvements:
· PTBatcherGUI has matured to become the default processor for stitching projects.
· ICC profiles saved in output.
· Support for newer Olympus camera.
· Improved auto cropping.
· New mask type: exclude region from all images shot with the same lens.
· Copy&paste of masks in Mask Tab.
· Show extent of active masks and crop in Mask Editor.
· Fix for critical issue affecting stitching on Mac OS X Leopard.
· Many more improvements and bug fixes.
· Libraries and Build Improvements
The Python interface introduces new dependencies:
· SWIG >2.0
· Python
· Languages
· A Danish translation has been added and a few translations have been updated for this release.
June 1st, 2011Improved Built-in Control Points Generator:
· CPFind's detection ability has been significantly improved, especially for wide angle (> FOV 65°) images, fisheye images, and rotated images. Anecdotal evidence shows it to be more accurate than any other CP detector ever used with Hugin. A thorough, scientific comparison against other CP detectors is welcome. If you have well formed comparison results, please publish a link on the Hugin mailing list.
Improved Fast Preview:
· An Overview pane has been added to the Fast Preview window. Users can now interact with the panosphere like in a virtual reality viewer in real time and visualize all areas of the panorama with little distortion, including the zenith and nadir that are typically excessively distorted in the flat preview.
· It is now possible to drag individual images or arbitrary groups of images on the panosphere in the fast preview.
· A new gray point picker has been added for visual white balance correction.
Registration of Stereo Images:
· align_image_stack is commonly used for the alignment of slightly misaligned images, e.g. for creating a High Dynamic Range image from multiple exposures when the camera was hand held.
· It has been extended with additional functionality for the registration of stereo images.
Other Improvements:
· New Thoby projection modeling 10.5mm Nikkor fisheye lens.
· Improved support for some keyboard shortcuts.
· New Preferences: output file format (LDR only).
· This release has the usual bugfixes and adds minor features.
Libraries and Build Improvements:
· CMake 2.8 or newer is now required.
· Support has been added for gcc-4.6 compiler.
· Libpano13 needs to be at least 2.9.18.
· Languages
· Many translations have been updated for this release.
January 2nd, 2011Built-in Control Points Generator:
· For the first time Hugin does not depend on a third-party control points generator. cpfind is the result of years of ongoing efforts and Google Summer of Code projects aimed at delivering a 'patent-free' control points generator. Third-party control point generators are still supported.
· Instead of passing an often incomplete and incompatible set of parameters through the command line, the built-in control points generator has direct access to all project information and tools. It speeds up and optimizes multi-row matching. It uses Celeste to identify the sky. Unlike most of its predecessors, it is multi-threaded and takes advantage of modern multi-core hardware.
· Additionally, Hugin now has the ability to save and load control-point generators settings from disk, reducing confusion and errors due to the changes in the command line interface of the third-party control points generators.
Improved Unattended Operation:
Many features improve unattended (batch) operation including:
· The Batch Processor has been improved and can now automatically detect projects.
· The Assistant is now batchable as well, so more operations can be automated and run unattended.
· More robust Makefiles to drive the stitching process
Improved Interaction and Functionality:
Many features improve user interaction (real-time) including:
· Masks have been extended with two new types to support stacks in the Masks tab.
· Numeric Transform now supports translation (mosaic mode).
· Photos are now loaded in a background thread. This means that Hugin projects can be used immediately without waiting for all the photos to be read.
· The Stitcher tab is now rearranged with less jargon to clarify the process.
· Better compliance with native user interface guidelines
· Hints in the Preview window now suggest improvements.
· Improved Reporting of Stitching and System Information
· System information is shown in About window.
· Stitching now reports more information about the current system.
· Stitching log can be saved for better bug reporting.
New Command-Line Tools:
· cpfind is a command line interface to Hugin's native 'patent-free' control point detector.
· icpfind uses the different control point detectors and heuristic control point detector strategies from the command line. It does not introduce new functionality; it allows running the different control points detectors with a unified command structure from the command line.
Refactored Makefile Library:
· Hugin stitches panoramas by chaining together individual commands. The stitching process is driven by make, a tool known for automatically assembling software, not images. The list of targets and the commands to reproduce them are described in a declarative language called a Makefile. Hugin leverages the benefits of make for the stitching process. Makefiles make the process easy to stop and start, postpone or continue on different machines, and generally makes everything very flexible and efficient. If a panorama has been only partially edited, the Makefile ensures that only those steps that have changed are computed again. Make enables advanced application such as automated stitching and distributed stitching.
· With this release, the stitching logic has been recreated with a new C++ library for creating Makefiles. This should enable better and more precise control over the various stitching tools and scripting of other aspects of panorama creation.
October 21st, 2010Layout mode:
· The Hugin Fast Preview window visualises your panorama and lets you change the project by dragging and clicking. This release introduces an extra mode for this preview that shows the entire project as a diagram with colour-coded lines connecting each of the photographs.
· Now with a glance you can see where the project is ok and where there are problems if it isn't quite right. Just click on any connection and Hugin jumps to the Control Points tab to edit that pair of photos.
Masking:
· Hugin uses multiresolution seam blending to join photos invisibly by smoothing colours and brightness. Controlling the location of this seam is now much easier with the new Mask tab, which instead of requiring you to place the seam itself, lets you just indicate the areas of photos that you do and don't want to be part of the finished panorama - The seam itself then gets placed intelligently using the remaining overlapping areas.
· Masks can be saved and reused in new projects, so objects that appear again and again like tripod heads can be easily excluded.
Mosaics:
· For a stitched panorama you shoot photos in different directions but from a single location, Hugin will happily assemble these into a complete scene. Now Hugin has an alternative mosaic mode — You can take photos of a planar object such as a floor, painting, or mural from any position, direction or angle, and Hugin will stitch them seamlessly just as it does with a normal panorama.
Linked bracketing:
· Hugin allows you to shoot exposure bracketed photos and panoramas, it will automatically combine them with exposure fusion or HDR merging into a single image that has the best areas of each photo in the stack. Hugin uses the same alignment process as with panoramas so even hand-held bracketing works perfectly.
· Photographers who use quality tripods can now skip this alignment stage by telling Hugin that photos in a bracketed stack are linked and share the same view.
Control point detector modes:
· Hugin uses plugin tools called control point detectors to automatically match features between photos. Previous versions of Hugin relied on the detector entirely, but now Hugin can make intelligent detector choices based on knowledge of the panorama.
· So Hugin can now match the photos in a multi-row panorama more efficiently and with less error by breaking the job into separate tasks, panoramas consisting of bracketed stacks can be automatically identified and Hugin will switch to using appropriate matching tools.
· Another new feature is that panoramas can be approximately aligned by dragging the photos around in the preview or using a template, the control point detector can then be asked to only check overlapping pairs of photos instead of all possible combinations of photos — This speeds things up and reduces the chances of false matches.
New lens types:
· Hugin supports photos taken with a wide range of 'normal' and fisheye lenses, and can fine-tune for variation of distortion from these standard types. With this release support has been added for orthographic, stereographic and equisolid lenses.
Migration to Mercurial:
· Development of Hugin sourcecode has switched from Subversion to Mercurial to better support parallel development and to reduce dependency on Sourceforge infrastructure.
Languages:
· Most of the translations have been updated for this release.
Other improvements:
· This release has the usual bugfixes, adds minor features, and provides some more command-line tools for scripting panorama projects.
October 21st, 2010Usability:
· The Hugin Fast Preview window is where you see a rough preview of the final panorama and can edit it with a selection of tools — For example, one of several 'modes' is Drag for moving photos around the canvas, there are also single click 'actions' to do things like reset the exposure or center the view.
· Now these tools have been overhauled to make them easier to find, to get a bigger panorama canvas, and to create space for new features in the pipeline such as the upcoming Layout mode. Switching 'modes' is more intuitive, with a tab for each that shows just the 'actions' relevant to that mode, the key enables full-screen viewing of the preview.
· There are other usability-related changes — the Hugin main window can also be viewed full-screen with ; more photo EXIF metadata is displayed in the Images tab; a list of recent projects is available in the File menu; plus there has been a general clean-up of text in the GUI and many updates to the manual.
Autocrop:
· Hugin is great for stitching hand-held panoramas, but nobody can shoot in perfect straight lines, so these panoramas need careful cropping to produce a picture with 100% coverage. The Fast Preview window now has an Autocrop button that does all this for you automatically — Just click, and the crop rectangle will be resized to use the largest possible area covered by your photos.
Deghosting:
· One of the advanced Hugin features is to merge bracketed photos using exposure fusion or HDR merging - This is done automatically when stitching when bracketed sets are detected.
· However, when people or objects move during a bracketed sequence, 'ghosts' appear in the result. So another Summer of Code project has now been integrated that both enables HDR deghosting in the GUI and provides an experimental deghosting_mask tool for exposure fusion deghosting with enfuse.
Languages:
· With the addition of a Finnish translation, the Hugin application is now internationalized for twenty-one languages, most of the translations have been updated for this release.
Other improvements:
· This release also has the usual incremental improvements: The default size of the image cache has increased in line with modern computers, so existing Hugin users may want to check or reset their Preferences to suit; the About dialog has been extended to show a full list of Hugin contributors, and there have been many other fixes for minor bugs and annoyances.
January 27th, 2010Automatic lens calibration:
· Hugin is already a great tool for calibrating lenses; by stitching a panorama Hugin will automatically calculate barrel distortion, vignetting and angle of view for any lens. Plus there is everything a power user might want: different lenses can be calibrated in a single project, fisheyes and shift lenses pose no problems to the Hugin optimiser.
· However, stitching a panorama is not the only way to calculate lens parameters; barrel distortion turns straight lines into curves, so figuring out how to straighten them again is enough to accurately calibrate a lens - All you need is an object with lots of straight-lines, such as a modern building, and one or more photographs of it.
· This year Tim Nugent was employed by Google Summer of Code to add a new Hugin tool called calibrate_lens, this takes such photos as input and produces calibrated parameters as output. There isn't yet a graphical interface, and the command-line tool still requires work to produce output compatible with Hugin, but this release provides a base to build future tools.
Control point cleaning:
· Hugin aligns photos using a system of control points; these are features from the scene that appear in each pair of overlapping photos. Normally just a handful of features are needed to get a good result, but they do need to be identified - This can be done either by picking them in the Hugin Control Points tab or by using one of the automatic control point creator plugins such as autopano-sift-C or pan-o-matic.
· These Control point creators are incredibly convenient, but still make mistakes that are obvious to the human eye. Hugin now filters automatically generated points to remove those that are statistically improbable. The same filter can be used to 'clean' an existing project on the Images tab, and is available as a new scriptable command-line tool called cpclean.
Languages:
· The Hugin application is translated into twenty languages, most of these translations have been updated for this release.
Other improvements:
· This release also has the usual incremental improvements: building on Windows, Linux and OS X is now easier, some crashes in obscure situations have been fixed, more useful photo EXIF metadata is shown in the Images tab, the manual has been updated to document current features and now displays in your default system web-browser, a bug where upside down crop rectangles confused the stitcher is fixed, and an annoyance where control point settings were not persistent between sessions is gone.
Control point generators:
· Hugin doesn't yet ship with a 'Patent Free' control point generator.
March 11th, 2009· Online help
· Hugin now has comprehensive help documentation for the entire user interface, the manual now includes glossary items explaining many panorama stitching and related photography concepts.
· Languages
· New translations include Slovak, Korean, Bulgarian and Spanish. This means that hugin is now usable with a total of twenty languages.
· New Assistant panel
· Creating simple panoramas is much easier, hugin now starts showing an Assistant with a simple 1-2-3 approach for loading images, aligning and creating the final output.
· The Assistant will estimate lens and camera parameters, then pick a suitable output projection and size, advanced options are still available for manual adjustment.
· Photometric model
· Previous versions of hugin and panotools had basic support for correcting vignetting and exposure differences between photos.
· This has been completely overhauled, hugin now internally uses the EMoR model for representing exposure photometrically. This means that the camera response curve, vignetting, colour balance and exposure can now be optimised in much the same way as geometrical properties such as position and lens distortion.
· The result is that blending between photos is better than ever before.
· HDR
· Previously hugin supported High Dynamic Range imaging solely by allowing stitching of HDR floating-point TIFF photos - These images themselves had to be created in another tool.
· Now, thanks to the internal photometric model, hugin can now create HDR output from normal exposure bracketed photos. The photos don't have to be perfectly-aligned, they don't even need to be nearly-aligned or have consistent exposure differences - The hugin optimiser will sort all this stuff out, and the stitcher will create
· OpenEXR or TIFF HDR output files for later tonemapping or use as lightprobes.
· Exposure blending
· HDR and tonemapping isn't for everybody, enfuse introduced exposure blending to the world, and hugin supports aligning and fusing bracketed stacks of photos, perfectly, all as part of the stitching process.
· So now with hugin-0.7.0 and enblend-3.2 you can create realistic, photographic panoramas that have no over-exposed or under-exposed areas.
· Makefile stitching
· hugin-0.7.0 introduces a new stitching back-end: previously the various stitching tools were executed directly by the GUI, now all the commands required to generate the output are written to a Makefile which is then processed independently of hugin itself.
· Aside from easier debugging and customisation; this background stitching allows you to get on with creating a new project while waiting for the previous job to finish - Stitching can also be deferred or shifted to another machine, even 'headless' servers can now be used.
· Projections
· Hugin has always had the ability to save panoramas using simulated normal and fisheye lenses, or 360 degree cylindrical and spherical projections.
· Now a whole series of alternative cartographic mappings are available, of particular interest are the 'conformal' stereographic and Mercator projections which can be used to show extremely large angles of view with no local distortion.
· Project templates
· Hugin project files can now be used as templates for new panorama projects. This is useful if you take a lot of panoramas with exactly the same camera positions.
There's a whole lot of other new stuff in this release:
· numbering in the control-point editor, straight-line control-points, numeric transform, clicking to rotate the preview, a straighten button, cropping of the output and probably more.
This release provides new command-line tools:
· align_image_stack: align a nearly-aligned stack of photos
· pto2mk: create a stitching Makefile from a pto project
· vig_optimise: optimise photometric parameters
· tca_correct: calculate lens chromatic aberration
· hugin_hdrmerge: assemble a bracketed stack to HDR
· matchpoint: classify control point features
· Control point generators
Hugin doesn't yet ship with a 'Patent Free' control point generator. So you either need to pick control points manually - Not as difficult as it sounds - or install and configure one of the following control-point generators as 'plug-ins', in no particular order:
· autopano-sift-C
· panomatic
· Autopano-SIFT
· Autopano freeware version
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