1. GOAL

Toolchain to create panoramic images for every occasion,
from quick holiday snaps to images with hundreds of megapixels.


2. CONTENT

This package contains the following programs:

 - hugin, The main program, a GUI for the panorama tools suite
   and some programs included here.

 - nona, a simple stitcher that does geometrical and photometric
    distortions to photos and writes the output to image files.
    It is a replacement for PTStitcher (doesn't support most
   features of PTStitcher, but is faster, opensource and
   will be extended in the future).  The parameters, mostly
   backward-compatible to PTStitcher, are specified in a .pto 
   project such as those generated by hugin, i.e. nona doesn't
   decide what the distortions are going to be, it just does 
   what it is told to do.
 
 - nona_gui, nona with a graphical progress bar.

 - autooptimiser, optimise a panorama pairwise, starting from an
   anchor image. cmd line version of the pairwise mode in hugin

These programs are built on top of the pano13 library,
http://panotools.sourceforge.net/


3. DEPENDENCIES

The following external programs are REQUIRED:

1. enblend 3.2 or later, this includes the enfuse tool
2. exiftool from the Image::ExifTool perl module
3. gnu make is required for stitching

The following external programs are highly recommended:

1. autopano-sift-C, panomatic, autopano or autopano-sift


4. USE
    
hugin can be used to stitch multiple images together. The resulting image can
span 360 degrees. Another common use is the creation of very high resolution
pictures by combining multiple images.

See http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ for more information and tutorials.

See http://wiki.panotools.org/Development_of_Open_Source_tools#Supported_Platforms
for some information on releases for different platforms.


5. TYPICAL WORKFLOW

  1. load images
  2. specify initial parameters (lens etc)
  3. select control points points.
  4. run optimizer to estimate image positions
  5. set output parameters and stitch images together.


6. KNOWN ISSUES / INCOMPATIBILITIES / LIMITATIONS

Linux: Compiz interferes with the fast preview window. This is not a hugin 
specific issue. Research shows all direct rendered stuff will have various 
problems under Compiz:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/96991
...until xorg has "Redirected direct rendering", which might take a long time.

It's not an issue with NVidia's proprietary driver.

If you're affected, the workaround is to not use Compiz.

Some components of Hugin have been reported not to deal well with image files
that have the same name in different folders. The workaround is to rename 
your images files so that all image files in a project are unique.


SUPPORT / COMMUNITY

Please use the hugin-ptx mailing list if you have questions or suggestions:
http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx