Panoramic stitching

[lethargic_man]

I've been applying myself to using hugin to stitch together my panoramic photos from my holiday, and oh boy. When it works well, it does a really good job, but when it doesn't, you get some monstrosities, and it's impossible to figure out how to fix them.

So I looked at the FAQ, and the tutorials, and they made reference to an "Assistant" tab that puts in all the control points, and does a better job by and large than doing it by hand... and wasn't present in my version of hugin. I was using the latest version of hugin for Fedora 8, but there's the rub: Red Hat keep releasing new versions of their operating systems on a frequent basis, and don't update software for very long on the old ones (except for security reasons); and I wouldn't be able to use the version for later versions of Fedora as the version numbers of dependent software wouldn't match. If I wanted the most recent version of hugin, I'd either have to upgrade my OS, or compile it myself.

I went for compiling it myself, which was relatively painless, as I found a web page giving the dependency list as a series of parameters to pass to yum (to download and install for me). I had more trouble with enblend, though: hugin passed an option to enblend that my version of enblend didn't recognise, and when I tried to compile the latest version of enblend, it failed at:

checking for cmsCreateTransform in -llcms... no

despite:

[michael@epicyclic tmp]$ locate liblcms
/usr/lib/liblcms.so.1
/usr/lib/liblcms.so.1.0.16
/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.7.0-icedtea-1.7.0.0/jre/lib/i386/liblcms.so
[michael@epicyclic tmp]$ 

In the end, I worked around the issue with a /usr/local/bin/enblend:

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/enblend `echo $@ | sed -e 's/--compression NONE//'`

...and I got a reasonable panoramic of my photo of Seville cathedral, after wasting a considerable amount of time trying it manually with the old hugin. But if this sort of thing happens again, I think it's going to have to be time to upgrade OS.

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Looks like you're missing the liblcms development package.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

yum search liblcms didn't point me in any helpful direction.

But I managed without it in the end, so that was all right.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I know nothing about Fedora but a couple of seconds of googling suggests you wanted liblcms-devel.

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

I hope you don't mind me asking what does compiling mean? As I use a computer, too, I think I should know that.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

The form in which computers execute programs is called machine code; it consists of a low-level series of operations like "add 2 to the accumulator", "shift this register 3 bits to the right", "store that register to this memory location", and so on. Moreover, all of the above are stored as numerical codes. It's not very human friendly.

We humans write programs in high-level computer languages, which read much more like English; but the computer doesn't know how to execute that. So we pass the programs through a compiler, which converts the high-level code into low-level machine code.

As a computer user (as opposed to a computer programmer), you would normally never have to do this yourself.