Hugin

File Release Notes and Changelog

Release Name: hugin-0.7.0

Notes:
Changes since 0.6.1

Hugin has changed enormously in the two years since the
0.6.1 release, hardly any part of the code has remained
untouched. There have been many many bug-fixes, improvements 
to the interface and lots of new features - Here are just
some of them:

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.

Other improvements

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.

Command-line tools

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

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'.

See the the README and INSTALL_cmake files for more
information.

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

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


Changes: