Panorama Tools

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Panorama Tools, also known as PanoTools, are a suite of programs and libraries originally written by the German physics and mathematics professor Helmut Dersch. Panorama Tools provides a powerful framework for re-projecting and blending multiple source images into immersive panoramics of many types. An updated version of the Panorama Tools library serves as the underlying core engine for many software panorama GUI front-ends.

Dr. Dersch started development on Panorama Tools in 1998, producing some of the most professional and versatile software available for building panoramas and more, but had to stop development in 2001 due to legal harassment and claims of patent infringement^[1] by the company IPIX. Dr. Dersch released the core library (pano12) and some of the programs of Panorama Tools (most notably PToptimizer) under the terms of the General Public License. The rest of the applications were made available as binary executables only, and for free without a proper license.

The development of the source code of Panorama Tools was continued by some members of the original Panorama Tools Mailing list. In Dec. 2003 they initiated a free software project which is currently hosted by SourceForge at http://panotools.sourceforge.net. SourceForge requires all hosted software to be released under an open source license. For this reason Dr. Dersch binaries are not hosted, there but can still be found in many mirrors.

The Panotools Mailing list (currently hosted by Yahoo Groups) is an active community that continues to discuss and promote the use of Panorama Tools.

1 Sub-components
2 See also
3 Further reading
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Sub-components

[edit] Original Release

PanoTools consists of the following components^[2]:

PTEditor: Java interactive panorama editor.
PTPicker: Java front end to panorama stitcher and other tools. It provides a graphical interface for feature point selection and position optimization.
PTCrypt: Java tool for scrambling pictures intended to be viewed on-line with PTViewer.
PTStitcher: Panorama stitching tool which remaps, adjusts and combines arbitrary images to panoramic views.
PTOptimizer*: Optimizes positions and sizes of images using control-point data.
PTStereo: Creates 3-dimensional objects from 2 stereoscopic or more images.
PTInterpolate: Physically valid true view interpolator. Given two images of the same scene taken from different positions, this tool creates views from any intermediate position.
PTMorpher: Morphing tool.
PTAverage: Averages images to reduce noise and enhance density.
PTStripe: Combines images into movie-stripes for viewing in object-viewers (PTMovie extension to PTViewer).
PanoTools Plugins: Photoshop, GraphicConverter and Gimp plug-ins for image correction and remapping. Also compatible to many other programs that can use Photoshop plug-ins.
pano12 library*: The underlying panorama library, currently used by several different panorama front-ends and command line programs.
pano13 library*: Current version of the library. No longer compatible with programs for which no source code is available.

\ *Open source.

[edit] Further Developments

In 2006 the functionality of PTstitcher was reproduced by the developers of Panorama Tools. Its functionality was broken into several program, in a attempt to modularize it:

PTmender*: Remaps one image at a time
PTblender*: Implements the rudimentary colour correction algorithm found in later versions of PTstitcher
PTmasker*: Computes stitching masks. It implements the ability to increase depth-of-field by stacking images
PTroller*: Takes a set of images and merges them into a single one
PTcrop*: Crops an image to its outer rectangle.
PTuncrop*: Opposite of PTcrop: takes a cropped file and creates an uncropped one.
PTtiff2psd*: Takes a series of input images and creates a Photoshop PSD file where each input file is a layer.

\ *Open source.

[edit] Front Ends and Applications

To make working with Panorama Tools easier and to add functionality, many interactive, graphical front-ends to Panorama Tools have been developed, both open source and commercial, along with a variety of other companion applications, which in many cases make interacting directly with the programs in the original Panorama Tools toolset unnecessary.

[edit] See also

hugin - free, open source, multi platform GUI frontend
PTgui - commercial, Windows and Mac OSX GUI frontend
PTMac - commercial, Mac OSX GUI frontend
PTAssembler - commercial, Windows GUI frontend
Pano2QTVR - commercial, transform panoramas into QuickTime VR movies
PTLens - commercial, Windows, correct lens distorsions

[edit] Further reading

The software Panorama Tools is mentioned and covered in several books, e.g.

Jacobs, Corinna - Interactive Panoramas: Techniques for Digital Panoramic Photography ISBN 3-540-21140-3
Andrews, Philip - 360 Degree Imaging: The Photographers Panoramic Virtual Reality Manual ISBN 2-88046-732-2
Gulbins, Jürgen & Steinmüller, Uwe - Art of RAW Conversion: How to Produce Art-Quality Photos with Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Leading RAW Converters ISBN 1-59327-067-4