Lake Wedgemount panoramas, and in praise of hugin

Here are the panoramas I promised; I'm quite pleased by how they turned out, apart from the pink artifact in the bottom left of one of them.

 My camera has a panorama assist mode (yours might too), which overlays a portion of the last shot on the opposite side of the view finder to help you line things up, but you could do it manually as well. I use hugin to stitch them together (, which is basically just a front end to panorama-tools, which is a library that seems to back most of the commercial stitching tools as well. The UI of hugin isn't anything to write home about, but it gets the job done most of the time once you realise what it's asking for.

 The library uses the SIFT algorithm, which I just noticed is patented by... UBC. Apparently they're not just good at fisheries stuff. I think I actually skimmed the paper it's described in once; from memory it uses principal components analysis (or related algorithms do, I don't remember), but that's about all I can recall!

Mark Hepburn 16 July 2009
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