Hugin-2010.4.0 release notes

Hugin is a panorama stitcher and more.

Dedication

This release of Hugin is dedicated to Milko K. Amorth (1960-2010). Details in the About menu.

Changes Since 2010.2.0

This is our third release in 2010. For the first time Hugin can be considered feature-complete. A third-party control points generator is no longer necessary. This release delivers some major new features, integrates some projects from the 2010 Google Summer of Code, and includes many general improvements.

Built-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 (see Refactored Makefile Library below).

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 on Windows, OS X, and Linux.
• 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.

Libraries and Build Improvements

• Hugin uses the wxWidgets GUI toolkit. Support has been added for wxWidgets 2.9. It is still experimental. Hugin still supports wxWidgets 2.7 and recommends 2.8.
• Support for gcc-4.4.4 and gcc-4.5.1 compilers.
• boost 1.34 minimum version required. At least the following boost libraries are required:
  • filesystem
  • graph
  • iostreams
  • regex
  • signals
  • system
  • thread
• Hugin defaults to saving TIFF files with LZW compression instead of PACKBITS. This requires a libtiff with LZW support.
• On Linux/Unix systems, libraries are now installed in a private location. This simplifies things for users who want to run multiple versions of Hugin simultaneously.

Migration to Launchpad

Tracking of bugs, patches, and features requests for Hugin has switched from SourceForge to Launchpad. Hugin's needs have outgrown the SourceForge tracker. The project is grateful to SourceForge for providing it with a nurturing infrastructure since inception. We hope that the more modern and feature-rich tracker on Launchpad will enable the project to work through the backlog of over 200 tickets and process an increasing amount of tickets more efficiently.

New Visuals

Hugin has had the same logo and icon almost since inception. Unfortunately, the source files have gone lost in time. Cristian Marchi contributed SVG files of new logo and icons that are an evolution of the original artwork by Dr. Luca Vascon. To celebrate the first feature-complete release of Hugin the project has adopted a new visual appearance. Moreover all artwork source has been collected into ./artwork-src. To facilitate contributions from graphic designers the generation of the actual buttons and icons has been streamlined and scripted.

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 ships now with its own 'Patent Free' control point generator. You can still install and configure one of the following control-point generators as 'plug-ins':

• autopano-sift-C
• panomatic
• libpanomatic
• match-n-shift
• Autopano-SIFT
• Autopano freeware version

The project will continue to support the plug-in architecture.

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 window by clicking 'Load defaults'.

For users compiling from source: note that the minimum version of wxWidgets supported is 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.

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.

Download

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

Hugin sourcecode can be downloaded from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/files/hugin/.

This is a sourcecode release. The project has limited resources and relies on third parties to produce binaries for the different platforms. Instructions here. If you have a build to contribute for your platform, contact the Hugin developers team. Experience from the beta cycle leading to this release has shown that binaries for most supported platforms are likely to be available within a few days of this release through the the usual distribution channels.