Hugin-0.8.0 release notes

Hugin is a panorama stitcher and more.

Changes since 0.7.0

The last release in October 2008 introduced major changes to the way Hugin worked. Although this new release looks and feels much the same as 0.7.0, it adds some great new features and makes a lot of small improvements:

Fast Preview window

A new Fast Preview window has been added, this uses OpenGL graphics acceleration to show changes as they happen. You can drag photos around the window and they will warp to their new positions in real-time. Everything else you need to turn, pan and crop your panorama can now be done interactively in the Fast Preview.

This Fast Preview also now acts as a hub for working with a panorama project: the Identify mode lets you click on the overlap between two photos to bring up the Control Point editor for that pair of photos.

Celeste sky identification

Stitching makes use of static scenery such as buildings to match photos together, however objects that move cause misalignments, and clouds move enough to be a particular problem. To make better panoramas, Hugin has now been trained as a Support Vector Machine to ignore clouds when matching photos.

New panorama projections

Panoramas tend to have a very large field of view, and Hugin does a good job simulating virtual wide-angle lenses for output. But painters and artists can do better than photographers, often spanning scenes that look absurdly distorted when squeezed into photographic perspective. Influenced by these vedutismo artists, Hugin introduces some new projections for more elegant wide-angle perspectives: Pannini, Biplane and Triplane.

In addition, Orthographic and Equisolid output have been added to Hugin's already extensive set of azimuthal projections.

Batch Processor

Creating Hugin projects is now easier than ever, but actually stitching large panoramas slows your computer - Usually at the same time that you want to do something else. Now with the Hugin Batch Processor, stitching can be postponed until it is convenient for you.

Projects can be added to the queue from Hugin itself, or directly by drag-and-drop from a file manager. In the Batch Processor you get an overview of progress where the projects can be easily rearranged, paused or canceled.

Online help

The manual has been updated to cover the new features and adds more glossary pages explaining panorama and photography related words.

Languages

Most translations have been updated, plus Hugin is now available in Slovenian and Chinese Traditional. The manual has been completely translated into Italian.

Other improvements

There are many more changes in this release, here are just some of them: a Reset... button in the Camera and Lens tab, better support for 'special' characters in folder and file names, Align... now works properly when loading saved lens .ini files, hints added to Control Point tab pull-down lists, stitching now starts with a series of tests, gcc-4.4.0 support, better Makefile plugin support, man pages for command-line tools, new button icons throughout and a command-line version of Celeste

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':

Upgrading

Upgrading from previous versions of Hugin should be seamless. If you do have problems with old settings, these can be reset in the Preferences by clicking 'Load defaults'.

For users compiling from source: note that the minimum version of wxWidgets supported is now 2.7.0, libpano13 needs to be at least 2.9.14, and that Hugin now requires GLEW, the OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library.

See the the README and INSTALL_cmake files for more information.

Thanks to all the contributors to this release and members of the hugin-ptx mailing list, too many to mention here.


Hugin can be found at http://hugin.sourceforge.net/.

Hugin sourcecode can be downloaded from sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=77506&package_id=78426.