Hugin is an awesome panorama photo stitcher. It can optionally use a helper program -
autopano-sift-C - to pre-align the photos into a panorama automatically. Autopano searches for common elements (called
control points) between all the images and feeds them back to Hugin to put the puzzle together. Hugin works fine without it, but in that case control points need to be created manually, which can be a laborious task.
The
autopano-sift-C program is not shipped with
Fedora because it is patent-encumbered in the US (the SIFT algorithm it uses is patented by the University of British Columbia). It can be found, however, as an RPM package in the
RPM Fusion repository.
At this time Hugin has a problem loading more than 124 images at a time when
autopano-sift-C is in use. You get the following error message:
Could not execute command: autopano-sift-c
If you look in the X session errors there's this:
$ tail -2 ~/.xsession-errors
...AutoCtrlPointCreator.cpp:1a7) automatch(): Too many arguments for call to wxExecute()
...AutoCtrlPointCreator.cpp:1a8) automatch(): Try using the %s parameter in preferences
The problem is that autopano-sift-c takes the image names separately on the command line and Hugin can't pass more than 127 parameters to it (this being a limitation of the toolkit it uses). The quick and dirty solution is to use an external script to convert a file containing image filenames to parameters:
#!/bin/bash
# Change Hugin Preferences -> Autopano as follows:
# Autopano-SIFT: path to this script
# Arguments: --maxmatches %p %o %namefile
dos2unix $4
exec autopano-sift-c --align $1 $2 $3 `cat $4`
And voila! Hugin can now load and prealign very large image sets. If you have spaces in filenames then you might need to massage that last part a bit to quote each name, but otherwise this should work just fine.
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