Hugin-2009.4.0 release notes

Hugin is a panorama stitcher and more.

Changes since 2009.2.0

The last release was barely a month ago, but we have a backlog of new features ready to go. So keeping with the intention of tracking development better with more frequent releases, Hugin now brings you two major new features as well as the usual bugfixes and incremental improvements:

Automatic 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. 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, freeglut the OpenGL utility toolkit, and libGLU the OpenGL utility library.

Support for the legacy libpano12 library has been discontinued.

See 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: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/files/hugin/.