Panorama stitching software

For the next set of Hawaii photos, I have two sets of panoramics that I wanted to stitch together. I'm on my travel laptop (Acer Aspire One D250) and using Picasa for photo managing. However, Picasa doesn't have a built-in panoramic stitching tool. So I looked around and tried some to compare:

The Contenders

Microsoft Research Image Composite Editor (ICE): Easy install and easy to use. Only one to offer automatic crop that actually works.

Hugin (GUI for panotools): It's on sourceforge, which is generally a good sign. However, to use the automatic control point detection, you have to separately install autopano-sift-C (and, as of 2010/12/26, it has to be version 2.5.1). There's some patent protection in place, however, and the site where I finally found a precompiled binary contained no less than 2 popups for Russian brides.

The Hugin GUI (2009.4.0) is not very easy to use, either. In order to get good results, I had to do some manual tweaking. Screenshots on their website suggest that the newer version (2010.2.0) is a bit sleeker.

Autostitch: I was impressed by the academic hostname, but the program isn't very polished. Download is just a zip file with a single executable, and the GUI is very plain. Everything is automatic, though.

Windows Live Photo Gallery: Easy install and easy to use, though it will try to take over photo management. Inconvenient resizing.

Results

Trees along HI-19 in Hilo

Microsoft Image Composite Editor

Hugin

Autostitch

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Tide pools at Kapoho

Microsoft Image Composite Editor

Hugin

Autostitch

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Discussion

Here are my ratings (5 = best):

Criterion	MS-ICE	Hugin	Autostitch	Windows Live
Ease of use	5	1	3	4
Invisibility of seams	1	3	5	4
Handling of subject motion between shots	5	5	2	5
Straightness of horizon	2	3	2	2
Exposure compensation	2	3	3	4

The Microsoft Image Composite Editor, although extremely easy and convenient to use, didn't perform very well. However, it might be more appropriate for easier stitching tasks, e.g. cases where everything in the image is "far away" (mitigating camera motion effects) and exposure is similar.

Hugin was just too difficult to set up and use, with little payoff.

Autostitch worked pretty well, and I think it handled the lines on the road best of all of them. That's probably due to aggressive blending, though, rather than good image alignment. This can be seen in the tree picture - look for the windblown palm and the pickup truck at the seam between the center and right photo.

So that leaves the Windows Live panorama stitcher as the best of the ones I tried. And honestly, I'm pretty satisfied with its results.

I've also heard good things about the Canon PhotoStitch software, so I'll have to dig out the CD that came with my digital camera and try it out.