Hi people,

I've been tinkering with hugin for a long time now and I've been
having progressively better results with comparatively less time spent
on each project! My panoramas are straightforward but I always shoot
hand held, so lots of parallax errors!

My main question is: Given that we have more than one way of getting
control points across all images, does it really help to have lots and
lots of (good) control points? I mean, given a good result from a
certain group of control points, is it reasonable to assume that if we
can produce a number of extra good control points, then a further
iteration will yield a better fitting?

Of course having good control points comes down to shooting good
images and discarding all the bad ones. This is where I get a great
help from the fine tuning functionality.
It is, however, still a bit of a mystery for me... Just after we fine
tune all our control points, we get this message saying that:
"problematic points can be spotted with a correlation <=0.900" and
that points with a correlation of 0.0 are also bad (can't remember the
exact text). But the issue is that the control point list dialog gives
us the distance between the same point in their respective pair of
images (I reckon; maybe I'm wrong...), not their correlation. I can't
find the correlation values anywhere! Naturally good control points
got better but I can't tell which points I should discard.

I have read on this list that after fine tuning, the cp distance is
actually their correlation (not sure if their values become equivalent
or if this is a tweak to help the ignorant chap trying to make a
decent panorama). The issue with this is that if I manually check one
control point with a distanceof 0.31 (after fine tuning, before
optimising) it seems fine - matches the exact same spot in both
images. And if I check another with 1.00, it also matches... so I'm
confused!

This leads me to propose a couple of suggestions that would help the
GUI in ease of use:
- Offer to discard points with that low correlation value range
(<=0.900). This would be an option that could appear on the dialog
just after completion of a fine-tuning process or could be enabled on
the control point list dialog just after the fine tuning process;
- A column could be added to the control point list dialog to include
the cp correlations... and perhaps an option to select by correlation
value range... much like the button that's already there;

The second part of this email is about another suggestion. It might
seem dumb or it might not fit in anyone else's work flow, but if it
does, maybe other people could benefit on it. If not, please disregard
and don't take offence.
Because I shoot hand held, I have lots of overlapping and that does
not always help. So I end up taking out a few images - 20-40% of them
generally - to improve fitting, seam and stitching quality.

My suggestion was about iteratively optimising fitting with a single
image taken out in an attempt to minimise error. Or in other words:
0. optimise, store maximum and RMS error values; set n=1;
1. remove image #n, optimise, store error values;
2. put image #n back, set n+=1, go back to step 1.;
3. compare all obtained error values; suggest to the user that if
image #m is removed from the project, errors are minimised to X and Y,
against the original values x and y;

So this would be like minimising errors by removing any single image.
It could be extended for multiple images, it could (and perhaps
should) take into account the number and quality of control points
linking images #n-1 and #n+1 just to check if it was worth the
optimisation effort (but it can also be easier to optimise anyway and
hope for higher error values if cps are bad), etc.

Once more, huge respect for all your hard work on hugin & surrounding
applications! It has been improving substantially at every step! Well
done!

Best regards,
Pedro.
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