pano-blend: open-source reconstruction of SmartBlend

[Pavel Peřina]

Hi all,

Some of you may remember SmartBlend (Michael Norel, 2007) - the enblend
alternative that often found less visible seams, but was 32-bit
Windows-only closed-source freeware, abandoned for years.

Starting from the recipe Norel himself posted to this list back in 2011
( https://groups.google.com/g/hugin-ptx/c/x_upOsb4FZg/m/sThqoOJo9h8J ),

with a little peeking into the binary and a lot of AI assistance, I've rebuilt it as an
open-source (MIT) C++/OpenCV tool: graph-cut seam finding with a
perceptual colour-difference cost, multi-band blending.

It works from the command line on nona's TIFF_m output, or as Hugin's
blender - set it as the enblend executable in Preferences > Programs
(tested).

No wrapper script or uncropped overlay images needed.

Code, docs and a prebuilt Windows x64 binary:

  https://github.com/pavel-perina/pano-blend
  https://github.com/pavel-perina/pano-blend/releases/tag/v1.1

Fair warning: it's a first working version. It gets slow with many images
(every overlapping pair is seamed) and it's not yet suited to very large
panoramas - it keeps full-canvas buffers per image, so memory grows
quickly with canvas size.

Single-row panoramas of a handful of frames are the tested territory.

Pavel

[Václav Černý]

Wow, 
it looks interesting; i remember trying SmartBlend years ago. 
Looking forward to trying your pano-blend  on upcoming projects.
Are you planing to add support for -w both     ( vertical and horizontal seam)?
I am usually making full 360*180 ( usually in 3 rows*9  images + nadir+ zenit ), and most of the time, i think that it should behave allright even without this feature  but seems nice to have.   

Best wishes from Prague    Václav 
P.S. I can provide you som  360*180 test data.
 

Dne čtvrtek 2. července 2026 v 23:28:14 UTC+2 uživatel pavel....@gmail.com napsal:

[Pavel Peřina]

Hi. I never worked with extra large panoramas, but first I want to restructure and optimize it a bit. Now it finds more seams than is needed/used (basically all combinations for overlapping images) and maybe it's not memory efficient. Later I want to extend it to large panoramas. Possibly process it by some large temporary blocks like 16000x160000 pixels and then creating bigtiff organized by tiles and save progressively 2x downsampled pages (kind of like google map tiles). My only problem is that I don't know which program supports it, we tried this approach at work with electron microscope images and tiff with 40000x40000 pixels means that program either crashes or it takes minute to decode whole image.

But I don't want to promise anything. I even tested this program only on three panoramas having between two and five photos, I haven't tried masks or panorama having multiple rows.

About -w switch, how does it work? does it wrap photo around top-bottom, left-right edge when placing it to output image and nothing else? 

Having some test data would be interesting (especially pre-aligned with pto file)

Thanks

Pavel

Dne pátek 3. července 2026 v 21:28:40 UTC+2 uživatel vaclav.va...@gmail.com napsal: