Image stitcher for panorama creation on fedora

Question

I have some sets of images which are similar to a normal panomama, but are created when the camera is still and the subject moving past the lens. Examples include capturing street art, labels on (rotating) cylinders, etc. In every case the camera is in video mode, and the video is broken into a boatload of
1920x1080 images. I can reduce the fitting effort by cropping, but I really would like to find software to take a series of images and cope with the overlap.

Naturally there is Windows software to do it, and a pair of jerks who say the Linux software is incapable. I have a few hundred of these videos, so "by-hand" is possible but doesn't scale well.

Any suggestions? The man page for hugin lists dozens of command line tools, and I script netpbm commands, and have even written a few tools, but if there's a "best practice" solution I can at least start looking in the right place.

Answer 1

yum install hugin. It's the best tool for the job. I've only ever used it by manually selecting the common points between images, but the GUI makes it quite easy to do that. There may be an automated way of doing it if you have large numbers of images, but I'm not aware of it. Hugin is immensely powerful and has a bazillion options for correcting various problems with the source images, but you can mostly ignore
them and the basic case of "load the images, select the common points and click go" works well enough for most purposes.

Comments

Many years ago, I used a tool called Montage from Caltech. It had a significant learning curve and was picky about image formats, but it is possible to get good results.

There's also a stitching plugin for ImageJ. See:
http://fiji.sc/wiki/index.php/Image_Stitching

Other possibilities include:

Panotools-ng: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/PanoToolsNG/
I've played with it some time ago, and got it to work with toy images.

There appears to be a GIMP plugin, but I've never used it:
http://stitchpanorama.sourceforge.net/

But, fundamentally, none of them are as easy to use as hugin, and I agree that I'd try that first and only deal with the learning curves/installation/prodding with the others if hugin doesn't work out.

Answer 2

I will try hugin again, my previous attempts took a lot of manual effort, and I was hoping to trade CPU time for mine. In any case, input much appreciated.