Performance Observations Stitching Applications

It does not make much sense to qualify stitching applications by their speed. !! But for the fun of it I compared the render time for 1 project in Autopano Pro and PTGui (both in Windows XP and Ubuntu  10.04 on the same hardware, Core 2 Duo 8300 @ 2,4Ghz).

Source Images:
12 images (Panasonic MDC FZ28, F5, 1/800s, 9.8mm)

Autopano Pro in Ubuntu (native): 3'34
Autopano Pro in Windows (native): 5'09

PTGUI in Ubuntu (Wine): 2'25
PTGUI in Windows (native): 3'05

Result file: ~14.5 MB JPG , ~15659 x 3925

Remarks:

• All default settings used.
• I also tested a virtual Windows XP in Virtualbox for Ubuntu, but the timing were much longer (using only 1 virtual CPU).
• The test above are in no way a re objective reference or whatsoever. It wont give you any advice what product is better based on timings.Is merely showing you you get more performance with Linux ! Most important is stitching quality and ease of use !
• When using batch stitching it does not matter if it takes 10 or 12 minutes (or any other time) because you can leave it running over night(s).
• For serious large gigapixel projects you need to operate in different scales. To stitch 100's of images in one project you need lots of memory and CPU horsepower if you want to render in reasonable amount of time.

On Stitching Software

Over the years I tried to optimize my workflow of creating virtual tour spots from fisheye images as well large regular panoramic views using stitching and graphics editing software.

Photoshop is my choice to finetune all panoramic works in terms of color temperature, brightness, contrast, and patching. I use PANO2VR to create flash files and do conversion between various formats.

But what is about stitching software ? I use 3 of them (PTGUI, Autopano, MS ICE). Why this ?

With some panorama images I get different results (mostly in the default mode), while sometimes PTGUI can immediately work out a good result with the source images, Autopano cannot handle it and vice versa.

Sample: PTGUI works

Sample: Autpano fails

I guess the algorithm behind the 2 applications are different.

Remarks:

• ICE is only suitable for regular (non-fisheye) images. Occasionally its default panorama detection works better.
• I tried to migrate completely to Linux (Ubuntu) to enjoy the flexibility and speed of Linux systems. While Pano2VR and Autopano have dedicated Linux versions, Photoshop and PTGui dont. You can run PTGui with WINE (a Windows emulator for applications), but to get Photoshop running with WINE requires more experimenting and might not 100% work.
• I also tried to migrate to GIMP, but after working for 15 years with Photoshop (it is around since 1990 with version 1.0) it is hard to re-adjust. It is free to use and it comes with its features close to Photoshop and certainly will satisfy your standard postprocessing needs.

Updates:

• 2010-08-22:
  Check this blog for CS5 with WINE.
  MS ICE does not work with WINE 1.3 and Mono.net 2.6.7

GIGAPAN Chinese Garden

Another GIGAPAN made with the modified gigapan systems head and the Panasonic Lumix FZ28. 96 images stitched with PTGui to a 14.200 x 17.300 pixel image (245MP). Not sure if it reveals much more details than 4 Canon 1Ds images stitched together. Maybe I will compare for this sake.

See the complete GIGAPAN here (link)

New Stitching application

During the last few years a couple of image stitching applications appeared on the scene and most of them matured well, means upgrades with faster performance, more functionality, better results and so on. Just to name a few (at leats these ones I ever used):

Panorama Factory (link)
Autopano Pro (link)
PTGui (link)
Hugin (link)

Today I prefer to work with PTGui with a truckload of manual functionality, as well superb results in auto-mode.

Btw, the Gigapan system is "shipped" with a stitcher as well. (link)

Microsoft Research just launched another new stitcher (ICE, Image Composite Editor) in the neighborhood of Deepzoom Composer and co. I just gave it a try and the results are pretty good. I will continue to test.

Some more info (link)
Download (link)