Autopano-SIFT2.3

Autopano-SIFT is a lightweight Windows application whose purpose is to help you create control points for multiple overlapping images. You can run it via the command-line console, integrated GUI or Hugin’s layout.Control points are used for aligning pictures by detecting several common features (e.g. an animal, door, tree) in more than one photo. Autopano-SIFT is able to automatically generate control points, which are used to pre-align photographs.

User interface

You are welcomed by a clean interface that allows you to add files in the working environment using the browse button (you cannot rely on the drag-and-drop support).You can build up a list with the images that you want to compute, check out information about them (filename, resolution and file path), and remove the selected items from the list. In addition, you can preview each picture in a small panel.

Generating control points

Autopano-SIFT gives you the possibility to alter several parameters related to control points. You may specify the downscale resolution, keep or double the input size, save key points to a file or compressed item, enter the maximum number of keypoints per image, as well as activate the RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus) or area filtration mode.What’s more, you may opt for an automatic pre-alignment of images and enable the refinement step. When it comes to exporting options, you are allowed to save data to PTO file format, pick the saving directory, output subpixel coordinates, and save absolute image pathnames to PTO files.

Assessing its performance

Autopano-SIFT carries out the process quickly but this pretty much depends on how many files you have added for creating control points. It is not quite friendly with system resources, so the overall performance of the computer may be hampered.

Bottom line

All things considered, Autopano-SIFT comes with a handy suite of features for helping you extract control points from images and automatically pre-align photos. On the downside, there’s no support for a help manual that could give rookies detailed information about the configuration settings, so they may need extra time to getting used to work with it.