Linux stitching

So you come home from the holiday, remembering that wonderful sky and white snow and the horizon and when you look at the pictures its not quite that way. Why? Well lets assume that you did took nice clear pictures, but they still don’t make the same impact as in real life. Its a matte of field of view. A normal eye has a field of view of around 140° while a normal camera has max 40°. So that’s why the images are not that god.

So what to do. Well there are special panoramic cameras but they are very expensive. The second options is to use programs to take pictures with overlapping areas and mount them together as one picture. This is called stitching.

I was doing that quite a lot when I was running windows but I havent had time to do it under Linux. There was some god programs for it under windows but now its time to se what I can find under Linux.

After some searching on the net, i did come acreoss Hugin. This is a descendant of PanoTools, an excellent suite of panorama processing applications first developed by German university professor Helmut Dersch. The original PanoTools are no longer being developed, so Hugin is what I started to test.

Installing

Installing Hugin was easy – its in the kubuntu repositories so I only had to do an apt-get install to get it installed:

Testing out

So the program is installed and the default place is under graphics. Staring it up gives you the assistance page. First klick on the Load image button.

I tested with 2 of the images from my latest vacation:

You can select multiple images with CTRL. When this is down it starts the scanning and processing of the images. It takes some time and when its done it will present the panorma preview. If you are happy you can close that down.

I then went into the sticher tab and changed the output format to jpeg. Then you can generate the images with stitch now, or go back to the assistance tab and click on create panorama button. This will give you a nice panorama:

First you see tha the images is not blended. This is because the stitching engine can’t do that, I found out, when doing jpegs, so i did a new one and let it save it as tiff and then i converted outside of Hugin to jpeg and got this result:

Much nicer blending but the pictures are a bit off in balance/contract and so, so you need to do some processing first. And when that’s done i also cut down the image and removed all the black background. Here is the final result:

Conclusion

I think that this show that most image processing and specificaly creating panoramas can be done in Linux without any problem.

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