Historical:SoC 2008 application

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?

http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?q=hugin

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbprzd/2126554118/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbprzd/2125768589/

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

hugin/panotools participated in GSoC 2007. We consider this participation successful for both organization and students. Our projects were:

• New extensible modular GUI framework for Panorama Photography.
• Anti-ghosting HDR panorama blending and merging algorithm. Jing Jin successfully finished the project and the code is now merged into hugin source code tree which we expect to release as 0.7.4 soon.
• Interactive Panoramic Viewer. This is a work on FreePV panoramic viewer. Since GSoC the work is still happening in the SoC branch of SVN. There is no release featuring changes done by the student yet. It is quite possible to see FreePV coce being integrated into VLC which is a popular crossplatform media viewer.
• Feature matching for panoramic images. Zoran Mesec successfully created Matchpoint - a new automatic control points generator that isn't affected by patents. Zoran also volunteered to be mentor for further Matchpoint development this year in GSoC2008 which shows his constant involvement into the project.
• VIPS integration. This project was supposed to bring very large images support to hugin, but failed.

Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.

Alexandre Prokoudine will be primary administrator. He currently resides in Moscow, Russia. He is involved into open source projects since early 2002 as technical writer, GUI translator (hugin, Inkscape, Scribus, Audacity, Rosegarden etc.) and functional specifications author.

Being interested in design and photography since 2005 he quickly started enjoying his role of communicator between developers of various open source projects. In 2006 Jon Philips, a Creative Commons advocate, and he co-founded a CREATE project where developers of creative applications (mostly graphics related ones as of now) can meet and work out standards, unified approaches to solving real life user issues etc.

In 2007 Alexandre served as backup administrator of hugin/panotools and Scribus organizations for Google Summer of Code.

What license(s) does your project use?

Both hugin, enblend/enfuse, panotools and matchpoint use GPL v2 or above.

What is the URL for your ideas page?

http://wiki.panotools.org/SoC_2008_ideas

What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?

http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/panotools-devel

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

We do not use IRC for communication. During GSoC 2007 we used Skype, but this is unlikely to happen again.

Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.

Yuval Levy is chosen to be backup admin. He did a perfect job as primary administrator during GSoC 2007.

Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account information.

Pablo d'Angelo

Pablo d'Angelo is the initiator and main developer of the hugin project. He has studied computer engineering at the University of applied sciences Ulm, and is currently working at the DaimlerChrysler Research Center in Ulm, where he does research on advanced 3D reconstruction techniques for industrial quality inspection. He is also working towards a PhD in the field of computer vision at the University of Bielefeld, which will likely be granted in Summer 2007.

Andrew Mihal

Andrew Mihal is the project lead and main developer of the Enblend/Enfuse project. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His specialization is in software for electronic design automation. He is also an amateur photographer, and enjoys turning academic research papers into useful open source projects as a hobby.

Jim Watters

Jim Watters is a Software Engineer at JFL Peripheral Solution, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, where he designs software for scanners. An avid user of PanoTools since 2000. A growing contributer to the source code of PanoTools since Aug 2003 and a current maintainer of PanoTools (http://panotools.sourceforge.net). Before receiving his degree in Computer Software in 1999, he received a diploma of Fine Art in Photography in 1990.

Most recently his attention has been directed to creating Immersive Panoramic Video.

Daniel M German

He is assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, in Canada. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

One of his areas of research is open source software development. He is interested in understanding how globally distributed individuals are able to work together to create commercial strength software. He has also explored the use of historical artifacts (such as version control logs, emails, defect tracking) to understand how a system has evolved and how this information can be used to continue its development.

More recently he has been interested in the field of computational photography. More specifically on how to project extreme wide-angle images and spherical panoramas into acceptable flat representations.

During the last year he has been the maintainer of Panotools (http://panotools.sourceforge.net).

As a university professor one of his jobs is the supervision of students. He has graduated 6 Master's students, and currently supervising 3 Master's, and 1 Ph.D. Student. He has supervised more than a dozen honours projects of undergraduate students in computer science.

He is an avid photographer. His works have been exhibited in several galleries.

Alexandre Jenny

Alexandre Jenny is graduate from Ecole des mines de Nancy, in physics and computer sciences. He spent 5 years in the computer game industry before starting to interest in panoramic.

He's casual photographer and he started interest in panorama when he moved near Alps mountains. After having climbed during 5 hours and reached the top, it's really frustating not beeing able to capture the whole panorama. So he started studying this field at this time. It was during the very early stage of Panotools. The main problem was not beeing able to create automatically controls points, so he wrote the first SIFT cp generator which is always used a lot today as a Panotools plugin : autopano v1.03.

After this first release and because he felt that some business could be build upon panoramic, he founded Kolor, a well know business which is the creator of Autopano Pro, a fully automatic stitcher. Autopano Pro uses an industrial strong implementation of the SIFT algorithm, but has also many other features in a single easy to use package.

Zoran Mesec

Steering Comittee

This year we also have a steering comittee - a group of professionals in panorama making.

Ken Turkowski

Bruno Postle

Thomas Rauscher

G. Donald Bain

G. Donald Bain manages the Geography Computing Facility at the University of California Berkeley, where he also teaches cartography and field studies. The rest of the time he devotes to VR.

Hi is a board member of IVRPA.

He travels and take panoramas for his web site: Don Bain's Virtual Guidebooks. This project (his wife refers to it as his obsession) has taken him from Tahiti to the Arctic, from the prehistoric ruins of the Southwest to the glaciers of the Canadian Rockies. As a compulsive educator it has been a real treat, documenting and sharing his landscapes with the world. He has taken over 4000 panoramas, with about 3500 currently on the site.

He co-founded the World Wide Panorama, the largest international collaborative effort showcasing over 3000 panoramas from VR-artists all over the world taken over 11 editions.