[ptx] a few bugs/questions: hugin, autopano, enblend

[J. Schneider]

Hello,
I have collected a few bugs, questions, and suggestions that occured 
during using the current version of hugin on WinXP SP1 german (with 
autopano and enblend) on quite a few panoramas. During several months, 
but allways updating to most recent versions when thy were available.

First of all: Except for some flaws in the windows interface (I know, it 
is not written for Win) it is a really nice workflow now, including 
autopano and enblend. The auto estimate feature is just great. Still 
some things are annoying:

hugin:
- When starting a new project after working on another project (i.e. not
   starting a project right after lauching hugin), hugin usually crashes
   at some point - sometimes right after adding new images, sometimes
   later.
   But anyway I have to save my project every few clicks to prevent
   data loss. Quite a few assertion faults.

- Does hugin use commas or points as decimal point character? I got
   quite confused. On my german system (using commas), hugin sometimes
   uses points, sometimes commas. Really! I ended up making copies of my
   lens profiles to match both cases. (If I load the wrong version, hugin
   ommits the digits behind the wrong type of decimal point).

- speaking of lens profiles: Would it be possible to use the lens
   profile files of PTLens? Once they are present on a system, it makes
   no sense to duplicate the information into another text file with
   slightly different format.

- When a second window is opened and in foreground (preview, "apply
   changes" dialogue), the focus may change back to the main window while
   moving the mouse towards the new window. Then I have to get it back to
   foreground e.g. with Alt+Tab to hit the apply or refresh button. Does
   not occur with control points list window. Pretty annoying bug since
   first version I tried in spring.

- Auto estimate is pretty precise usually. Sometimes it fails
   completely. I had the impression particularly with image pairs of
   different orientation (i.e. one landscape format, one portrait)
   It barely works on finding horizontal or vertical type points.
   Shouldn't it be disabled automatically in such cases?

Autopano:
- v 1.03 (21.07.2004) still produces clusters of control points
   sometimes, sometimes so close to each other that they are barely
   distinguishable. The rest of the image pair may be empty. Sometimes
   perfect.

- I am not a programmer, I don't have any understanding of the
   algorithms for finding controll points. But I would dare to suggest
   one simple check: Is the spatial relation between controll points
   similar in both images? This means: If point 2 is right of point 1 in
   one image, it can't be left of it in another image. This might help to
   avoid mismatches especially with recurrent patterns like windows.

Enblend:
- Just one small thing: The verbose output is interesting sometimes. But
   it does not provide an overview of the whole process. I am told which
   image is processed at the moment, but I don't know how many are to
   come yet. Best would be a percent disply. If this is too difficult to
   estimate, a display like "proccessing image x of y" would allready do.

- an option to run enblend in low priority would be nice.


Hope this feedback helps for further progress. Anyway great work so far!

Joachim Schneider