Hugin-2015.0.0 Release Notes

Hugin is more than just a panorama stitcher.

Changes Since 2014.0.0

Hugin 2015.0 has a number of new features. Most of the changes are under the hood to improve stability, allow easier maintenance and easier addition of new features.

The makefile based stitching engine has been replaced with direct calls to the underlying programs. This should reduce the overhead of calling the same program too often and so speed up the whole process. Hopefully this also allows the usage of more unusual characters in the filename. Instead of pto2mk and make we now have hugin_executor which can also be used for running the assistant from the command line.

Hugin now has it's own blender, verdandi, based on a watershed algorithm, which has been included in 'nona'. verdandi can be chosen as the blender by choosing "builtin" in the stitcher tab, and can also be set in the Preferences. verdandi can also be called as a command line tool.

The lensfun library has been removed as it did not fulfill our expectations. It has been replaced with our own camera and lens database which uses a data mining approach and operates automatically without user intervention. Geometric distortion and vignetting data have to be loaded manually.

The fast preview window has a new tool to add or remove control points to selected areas in the output projection.

Automatic exposure stack detection is now applied when loading images, and an option has been added to unlink image position when adding stacks.

The fine-tune and auto-estimate functions in the control point tab have been made projection aware. It should now work also with images with different fov or different projections. The fine-tune feature has had a significant speed up when Hugin is compiled with the libfftw3 library (optional).

PTBatcherGUI has more choice for the end of the process: depending on the operating system the PTBatcherGUI can be closed, the computer can be shut down or send to the hibernate mode.

PTBatcherGUI now shows the thumbnails when searching for images in directories.

Many of the underlying tools in hugin are now able to use available cpu cores.

New command line tools for CLI processing:

verdandi: tool for image blending

hugin_executor: stitching and run assistant from command line

hugin_lensdb: tools for lens database maintenance

Other Improvements

Many more improvements and bug fixes.

Languages

Most of the translations have been updated for this release.

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'.

It is strongly recommended to set the default control point detector to Hugin's CPFind. It is the only control point generator endorsed by Hugin. Third-party generators may be compatible with the plug-in architecture.

Compiling

Users compiling from source refer to the list of dependencies and the platform-specific build processes described in the wiki. More information in the README and INSTALL_cmake files in the tarball.

There are some changes in the build process in contrast to Hugin 2014.0:

An OpenMP capable compiler is strongly recommended. A compiler without OpenMP support creates now executable which runs only single threaded.

Hugin is now using some C++11 features. If your compiler does not support C++11 it provides a fallback to Boost libraries instead.

Changes to dependencies lensfun library and all dependencies of this lib are no longer needed. sqlite3 is now needed for camera and lens database libfftw3 is optional, but recommended. With libfftw3 the finetune feature and align_image_stack show a significant speed up. libvigra >=1.9 is now required (the internal old vigra library has been removed from Hugins source code). Check that libvigra is compiled with TIF, JPEG, PNG and *OpenEXR* support (at least the OpenEXR support is by default optional and needs to be activated explicitly during compiling of libvigra)



Download

Hugin can be found at SourceForge and Launchpad.

User communities produce executables for their respective platforms. Executables are likely to be announced within a few days of this tarball release on the mailing list and added to the download section on SourceForge.

Thanks

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