Hugin - Panorama Tools

Hugin is a piece of software used for stitiching images. You can take several photos, taking some care to have 30 percent overlap or so, and then use this program to stitch them together into a continuous image. When it works, it works very well.

These are my notes on the program, in particular the process needed to build and install it on Linux Fedora Core 4 and 5.

The Links

  • Hugin - Panorama Tools
  • Panorama Tools
  • old mirror of original Dersch panorama tools site
  • Helmut Dersch (panorama tools author)

    The Downloads

    Here are my notes on building this for Fedora core 4 (I will add the Fedora Core 5 notes pretty soon, I hope). First download the following three packages:

    I also downloaded these, but haven't found them necessary, nor have I done anything with them yet:

    Setting things up

    The install phase of the various packages will want to put stuff into /usr/local. You can just su to root to do the make install, but I dislike this. What I do is to make the entire /usr/local tree owned by me via:
    su chown -R tom:tom /usr/local

    This works fine since I can now put stuff there and run stuff out of there without ever having to touch root ... and I will find out if any of the makefiles try to put things in to /usr/bin or some such.

    Building libpano

    libpano needs to be built first. This goes without a hitch:

    Stuff gets placed into /usr/local/lib, /usr/local/bin, and /usr/local/include/pano12. We will see if there are troubles with subsequent builds finding this stuff (there aren't). A peek at /etc/ld.so.conf shows that it has /usr/local/lib in the list, so this apparently is adquate to allow things to go smoothly.

    Getting wxGTK and boost

    Hugin requires wxGTK and wxGTK-xrc (which it uses as a set of GUI widgets, allowing it to be built on linux and windows both). It also requires boost, which is some group of C++ packages or some such. It is possible to obtain these as RPM packages via yum, and that is what I do. I already have boost boost-devel on one of my systems, but on another I needed to get boost-devel by invoking yum: 
    yum install boost-devel
yum install wxGTK wxGTK-devel wxGTK-gl

    Building Hugin

    The first time I built hugin I just launched into it first, and let it trip over the things above and then went and found them. Problems would show up when running configure, but the second time through, after doing the preparation above, I was just able to smoothly build it.

    This puts lots of stuff into /usr/local/share. It wants to fiddle with /usr/bin/update-desktop-database and gets in trouble, but I don't think I care about that.

    Now I can type hugin at the command line and voila, I get the hugin GUI looking at me, and load a first trial pair of JPEG images, but am quickly informed that I will be much happier if I also install enblend.

    Building enblend

    This is pretty easy after going through the above. It does require boost, but we already have that from the above, so the following familiar sequence is straightforward:

    Using hugin

    This is a bit tricky, and all I can say is to spend some time reading the tutorials on the hugin site.
    Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

    Uncle Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org