articles/Review/hugin-page2
by Mike McNamee Published 01/04/2013
Hugin
Hugin is a cross-platform open-source panorama photo stitching and HDR merging program developed by Pablo d'Angelo and others. It has the supreme advantage of being free and we are indepbted to John Widdall for bringing it to our attention. It is a GUI front-end for Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools and Andrew Mihal's Enblend and Enfuse.
Stitching is accomplished by using several overlapping photos taken from the same location, and using control points to align and transform the photos so that they can be blended together to form a larger image.
Hugin allows for the easy (optionally automatic) creation of control points between two images, optimisation of the image transforms it, along with an identical preview window so the user can see whether the panorama stitch is acceptable. Once the preview is correct, the panorama can be fully stitched, transformed and saved in a standard image format.
One of the features that caught our eye when it was demonstrated was the ability to perform Pannini projections*.
*The Pannini projection is a mathematical rule for constructing perspective images with very wide fields of view. It is named in honour of Gian Paolo Pannini, an 18th century Roman painter and professor of perspective, who may very well have used it to draw spectacular views such as the one above; for it can be realised with drawing instruments almost as easily as the standard rectilinear perspective projection. However, it is not now taught in art schools, and was apparently never described in print before its recent rediscovery by a team of open source software developers.
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