Hugin-2010.2.0 release notes

Hugin is a panorama stitcher and more.

Changes since 2010.0.0

This is our second release in 2010. It delivers some major new features, completes integration of projects from the 2009 Google Summer of Code, and includes many general improvements.

Layout 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.

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 2.9.17, and that Hugin 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/.