Panoramic Photo Stitching With Hugin

Update 19 September 2013: I have since updated the gallery page. As I am moving away from using Drupal, some or all of the links below may not work any more. I made a simple gallery page which makes use of Brain Maps API to emulate the Zoomify function. I also used the great jQuery Masonry library to layout the gallery page.

Something I discovered a while back was stitching photos together to form panoramas. I have been trying out a few examples, which are shown in the pano gallery. Not much of a great selection, but I keep meaning to do more.



I have been using software called hugin, which is an open source program, which I believe is available for multiple platforms. I am using it on Ubuntu. I am using this in conjuncture with autopanog, another open source program that comes pre-installed with Ubuntu.

Hugin is a program for optimising and creating images stitched together from multiple images. Obviously the images should be suitably overlapping to form a panorama. The capabilities of this program are way over my head, I am probably only scratching at the surface. Still it has been doing the basic job for me so far... I am sure I will learn more tricks. There are plenty of tutorials on the web.

Autopanog is a neat program I am using to automatically create control points on the adjacent images in any series. You can do this manually in hugin, but I am finding that autopanog does a brilliant job of this and it outputs in a format that you can open with hugin. Hugin can then just align the images based on the control points defined by autopanog. Like I said, I am sure there are many more things you could then go on to tweak within hugin, but the basic result is good enough for me at this stage.

Edit: Realised now that you can do this autopano work within hugin itself, just use the assistant on the first tab. 1. Load images, 2. Align... This align performs the same steps as autopano.

I have enabled the zoomify module on my drupal site and these high-res images are the perfect examples to make use of it. I was using some other software before that basically mimicked the zoomify software, but now, thanks to drupal, it is all very nicely integrated into the site. I can just upload a photo as an image node and it automatically gives you the option to use zoomify to view the image (if it is over a given size).

Click on the image below or in the navigation menu on Interests > Hugin to go to the gallery.