OT: the future of enfuse/enblend

[Joergen Geerds]

sorry about the OT post.
It has been very quiet around enfuse/enblend for the last months since
the 4.0 release... does anybody know where the project is going, or
what plans/developments are coming?

joergen

[cspiel]

Joergen -

On Mar 31, 3:09 pm, Joergen Geerds <jgee...@gmail.com> wrote:
> sorry about the OT post.

Hey, it's not OT at all.


> Does anybody know where the project is going, or
> what plans/developments are coming?

I don't known what my co-developers have
up their sleeves, but I have some patches in my
queue. Don't hold your breath, though.

I've had an idea of a new way to optimize the
seam position, which I have passed on to Brent.
AFAIK, he is thinking about a twist of the
current seam-line optimizer to get rid of those
pesky loops:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/enblend/+bug/739060

And maybe he'll find a way to improve on the DT:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/enblend/+bug/739057


HTH,
Chris

[Joergen Geerds]

On Mar 31, 11:00 am, cspiel <csp...@freenet.de> wrote:
> I don't known what my co-developers have
> up their sleeves, but I have some patches in my
> queue.  Don't hold your breath, though.

Chris,
Glad to hear that it's not on hiatus. enfuse is such an integral part
of my workflow, that I really would like to see it developed
further... is there any decent/good way to submit feature requests, or
do you prefer personal emails?

joergen

[cspiel]

Joergen -

On Mar 31, 5:38 pm, Joergen Geerds <jgee...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Glad to hear that it's not on hiatus.

Well, taking the current commit rate as
a gauge, the Enblend/Enfuse project pretty much
is "asleep".


> Is there any decent/good way to submit feature requests, or

> do you prefer personal emails?

The preferred way for any kind of feature
request or bug reports is via the LaunchPad
bug tracker:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/enblend

OTOH, if you have got one or more patches
against the tip of the hg repo _and_ you manage to
convince/sweet-talk me that they are good for
all of the whole wide blending/fusing world, you
can take a short cut: instead of attaching your
patches to the bug tracker's ticket, send them directly
to me and I'll apply them (usually only after an
intense e-mail discussion that is).


Cheers,
Chris

[Jeffrey Martin]

Has anyone studied smartblend verbose output to figure out how it works?

It is vastly superior to enblend (in terms of seam placement). And it's old, crusty, closed-source, and definitely not going to be updated again.

This to me is one of the biggest drawbacks to the hugin collection of software.

[Joergen Geerds]

On Mar 31, 1:50 pm, cspiel <csp...@freenet.de> wrote:
> Well, taking the current commit rate as
> a gauge, the Enblend/Enfuse project pretty much
> is "asleep".

hmm, unfortunately, I don't know enough about coding, I am more an
enduser.

> The preferred way for any kind of feature
> request or bug reports is via the LaunchPad
> bug tracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/enblend

done and posted to the launchpad site... I hope it makes any sense.

> OTOH, if you have got one or more patches
> against the tip of the hg repo _and_ you manage to
> convince/sweet-talk me that they are good for
> all of the whole wide blending/fusing world, you
> can take a short cut: instead of attaching your
> patches to the bug tracker's ticket, send them directly
> to me and I'll apply them (usually only after an
> intense e-mail discussion that is).

I will fall back to that once I find more important things I would
like to see in enfuse (and that would help the world).
But thank you so much for the info so far, and thx to everyone on the
dev team for coding enfuse... it's awesome.

joergen

[Bart van Andel]

Well, I didn't exactly study the verbose output, but some time ago, I sent Michael Norel (the author of Smartblend) a message, asking about SB going open source. This was a follow-up on an email sent earlier and discussed briefly here [0]. Maybe the email and reply are interesting to the group, so here they are:

-----me (9 Feb 2011)-----

Hello Michael,

It's been almost 2 years since we were last in touch. I imagine you have been very busy. Is there any news on the Smartblend sources and/or any further development?
Out of curiosity: what other projects are you involved in? Anything image-related? I found out that you used to have a website about Smartblend, but it has been turned into one of these annoyingly useless "search page" sites by some domain scraper, unfortunately.
Hope to hear from you soon.

Best regards,
Bart van Andel

-----Michael Norel (10 Feb 2011)-----

Hello.   Still no development and no plans for SB and no news. But anyone still can contribute to ENBLEND project or related. There a re many good algorithms to use for blending in public domain.   psychovisual error + kolmogorov min cut + ENBLEND + subpixel acuracy and pyramid with alpha channel = smartblend   Last years my work is Computer Vision , Real Time SFM , Augmented Reality. So i spend my time for very intresting things, more complex than smartblend.   Thanks.

---------------

Sorry for not posting this sooner, I kind of forgot about it until I read Jeffrey's post.

[0] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/hugin-ptx/5oRw_6uVsoI

--

Bart

[kfj]

On 31 Mrz., 22:18, Bart van Andel <bavanan...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, I didn't exactly study the verbose output, but some time ago, I sent
> Michael Norel (the author of Smartblend) a message

He is not precisely verbose ;-) I wrote an email to him last year
asking if he couldn't maybe modify smartblend to process cropped TIFF
format, which nona outputs per default. Smartblend can take x and y
offsets if you carefully handfeed them to it explicitly, but it sure
ignores the information in the TIFF (like many other programs do as
well). It should have been easy for him. Let me quote, while we're
gossiping - here's my mail to him:

Dear Michael!

I have been using smartblend with hugin for a while, and there is one
point where I'd like to see a new feature in your program:

hugin can save the warped files which are to be blended as 'cropped
files'. This saves time and disk space. The cropped files contain the
TIFF tags XPosition and YPosition, which give the offset from (0,0) in
terms of XResolution and YResolution, so to gain the pixel offsets,
one has to multiply the (floating point) Position with the Resolution.
The resulting value is precisely what you expect as -xoff and -yoff
parameters preceding the filename. If your program could recognize
cropped TIFF files, it would become unnecessary to deliberately use
uncropped files in hugin, so that smartblend can blend them.

<...>

I went on a bit about how I worked around the limitations using a
Python wrapper, but I reckon you get my drift. Here's his reply:

Hi

The description of SB psrsms is available, so Hugin can generate this
params for SB.

Thanks.

At least he deemed me worthy of a reply. So I continued using
smartblend with a python wrapper to extract the crop values from the
TIFF and make them into smartblend xoff and yoff parameters, which
saves quite some time compared to using uncropped TIFF. I even wrote
another Python wrapper to use smartblend under wine on Linux, where
smartblend fails because it expects a MSDOS type path (like C:\x\y
\z.tiff) and can't cope with a UNIX type path gracefully, even though
this should take minimal effort.

I finally gave up on smartblend, because I found that over the last
year enblend improved it's seam placement so much that I hardly had a
problem with enblend results any more. Smartblend's static closed-
source status doesn't help much, either.

Kay

[Jeffrey Martin]

psychovisual error + kolmogorov min cut + ENBLEND + subpixel acuracy and pyramid with alpha channel = smartblend

EASY! ;-))))