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Panoramic Image Stitching Tools for Unix?
jbuberel asks: "I just got myself a fancy new Canon Powershot S400 camera. One of it's nifty features is it's 'Panoramic Assist' mode that helps you line up a series of images that can later be stitched together to form one larger panoramic image. Of course the software that ships with the camera to do the stitching is Windows-only. After spending some time probing freshmeat.net and google.com, I came across one dead project, and another relatively academic project who's tools are largely undocumented. So are there any up-to-date tools for composing panoramic photos in Unix? With so many digital photo afficianados out there, I was surprised there wasn't an easy-to-use GIMP plugin for this."
Check the archives of Apple's QTVR Mailing List - this question comes up all the time, and the pros and cons of every existing image stitching program for every operating system have been discussed at great depth many times.
You might want to try Pano Tools if you can track down a copy, I've heard good things about them, but I think there was a problem with iPix claiming they infringed on a patent related to unwrapping spherical images.
Personally, I use Vr Worx 2.1 for stitching together panoramas, and making simple QTVR scenes. I've been very happy with it. It does only run under OSX, so it may not be suitable for your needs.
Check out this link at The ScreenSavers. They had this guy come in talking all about the equipment, software, etc that he used to make 360 degree Panoramic views.
HTH
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
I also searched for easy to use panorama software. So far the best solution I have found is running The Panorama Factory with wine. Works great.
That was Panotools - you can read the story here.
iPix claims to own the concept of flattening out an image taken through a fisheye lens into a panorama. They are rather aggressive in going after anyone they thing might infringe.
This is part of the reason that iPix has a rather bad reputation among many people (the other reasons are the low quality of the images their software generates, and the per-image-generated fees they charge for the use of their software).
unfortunately I haven't a clue where to begin googling for it :/
At http://www.google.com ?
The comparametric project *has* a GIMP plugin. Its there in the download (or it was last time I looked a year and a half ago)
Here you go!
I couldn't find the site you refer to, although one of the other posters to this thread has given us another mirror.
A bit more searching though, and it appears that the IPIX trouble may not be the cause of the current outage - see this.
Panotools is available for many platforms and compiles and runs fine on linux. The software is a bear to use but is regarded by many to be the best panorama software out there. It works great for me.
The java frontend is even pretty good and works fine on about anything that can run java (and is REALLY fast)... if you're on Windows, though, PTGUI is pretty much the same as the java interface, just faster, and on the mac, PTMac fits the bill for a front end.
Just search the net for panotools to find it; it's everywhere.
~GoRK
The software seems to be available here.
Find free books.
http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~dersch/
The path "/~dersch/" suggests that this is a UNIX system and that Dersch actually has an account. Creating an account would seem like unnecessary trouble to go through for simply mirroring a site. But, of course, it could just be a weird setup.