PanoTools / Hugin accepted for Google Summer of Code

It went well into the night, it was full of tension and suspense, but when Google finally revealed the list of accepted students to this year's Summer of Code, it was good news for panoramic photography.

This is the biggest Summer of Code ever and Google has shown tremendous generosity by massively increasing the number of accepted applicants - from 600 (last year) to 800 (this year's budget), then to 900 during preliminary allocation to end up at "over 900 from a pool of over 3,000 student and nearly 6,200 applications". [1]

Following up on an idea of Pablo d'Angelo (the initiator of hugin),Yuval Levy set in motion a team effort to build a mentoring organization [2] with recognized experts from the community and beyond.

This community effort [3] was recognized by Google who accepted the hugin/panotools bid to be one of 131 accredited mentoring organization (out of over 300 applications) in the same league as established open source projects such as MySQL, Mozilla, Drupal and FreeBSD.

The following projects are scheduled for completition by August 31 [4]:

Pedro Alonso from Spain, mentored by Herbert Bay from Switzerland, will develop a new algorythm to identify better control points, so critical to the stitching process [5]

Ippei Ukai from Japan currently in Scotland, mentored by Yuval Levy from Israel currently in Canada, will produce a new user interface to make this versatile tools even easier to use on multiple platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux/Unix) [6]

Jing Jin from USA, mentored by Pablo d'Angelo from Germany, will develop a robust blending algorithm to eliminate ghosting in HDR panoramas to widen the range of applications for the HDR technique beyond the perfectly still scenes [7]

Mohammad Shahiduzzaman from Bangladesh, mentored by John Cupitt from UK, will look at the current bottleneck in panorama rendering to enable efficient processing of very large images [8]

Leon Monctezuma from Mexico, mentored by Aldo Hoeben from The Netherlands, will build on the community effort started last year to produce a modern, native, universal VR viewer to support the widest variety of panorama formats on multiple platforms [9]

"Each of these projects has the potential to have a big impact on how we make and use panoramas and I am thankful to Google for this great opportunity and to all those community members who participated actively in the inception of this initiative." said a visibly happy Yuval Levy. "Please welcome these student's contribution to the community and support them with all means you can afford".

A number of community support initiatives are planned throughout the summer. Current open source code contributors can contribute over the established developers mailing lists [10],[11],[12],[13]