Panorama Tools ''(also known as PanoTools)'' are a suite of programs and libraries for

image stitching Image stitching or photo stitching is the process of combining multiple photographic images with overlapping fields of view to produce a segmented panorama or high-resolution image. Commonly performed through the use of computer software, most app ...

, i.e., re-projecting and blending multiple source images into

immersive panorama VR photography (after virtual-reality photography) is the Interactive computing, interactive viewing of wide-angle photography, panoramic photographs, generally encompassing a 360-degree circle or a spherical view. The results is known as VR pho ...

s of many types. It was originally written by German

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which rel ...

and mathematics professor Helmut Dersch. Panorama Tools provides a framework An updated version of the Panorama Tools library serves as the underlying core engine for many software panorama

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows User (computing), users to Human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through graphical icon (comp ...

front ends.

History

Dersch started development on Panorama Tools in 1998, producing software available for creating panoramas and more, but had to stop development in 2001 due to legal harassment and claims of patent infringement by the company IPIX. Dersch released the core library (pano12) and some of the programs of Panorama Tools under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

. The rest of the applications were made available as binary executables only and for free without a copyleft license. The development of the source code of Panorama Tools was continued by some members of the original Panorama Tools mailing list. In December 2003 they initiated a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

project which is currently hosted by

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrori ...

. SourceForge requires that all hosted software is released under an

open source license An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. This allows end users and commercial compa ...

. For this reason Dersch's unlicensed binaries are not hosted there, although they can still be found on mirror websites. On 5 August 2007, Dersch announced his intention to relicense the Panorama Tools source code.Alt URL
/ref> On 9 August 2007, Dersch changed the license to a

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

Sub-components

Original release

PanoTools consists of the following components:Dersch's original home page ;PTEditor:

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

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 or more

stereoscopic Stereoscopy (also called stereoscopics, or stereo imaging) is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any stereoscopic image is ...

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 Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in ras ...

, GraphicConverter and

GIMP GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized ...

plug-ins for image correction and remapping. Also compatible to many other programs that can use

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.

Further developments

In 2006 the functionality of PTstitcher was reproduced by the developers of Panorama Tools. Its functionality was broken into several program, in an 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.

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 (e.g. Hugin) and commercial (e.g. PTgui and PTMac), along with a variety of other companion applications (e.g. smartblend and ), which in many cases make interacting directly with the programs in the original Panorama Tools toolset unnecessary.

References

External links

*
Helmut Dersch
author's current site.
Helmut Dersch old page
author's site last state before it was taken offline in 2001.
PanoTools.org
primary community page recommended by the SourceForge project {{Raster graphics editors Free graphics software Free software programmed in C Free photo stitching software Photo software for Linux