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':

 * autopano-sift-C
 * panomatic
 * match-n-shift
 * 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'.

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 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/.

SHA1SUM: a801a2521d66a9b0c8680bdfe84afe67bc79d1c8  hugin-2009.4.0.tar.gz

This release is identical to 2009.4.0_rc3 and equivalent to 2009.4 
branch svn 4742.