current image stack alignment recommendations?

[clepsydrae]

When I want to align a stack of images, I usually use hugin. But I want to align a stack of several thousand (small) images and hugin can’t handle it.

For this I would turn to align_image_stack on the CLI, but hugin is (apparently?) no longer available in package form for Ubuntu 22.04 (standard repo or the repo described here). As a result I use the AppImage from here, but that doesn’t provide access to the align_image_stack command (AFAIK).

Can anyone recommend either a way to get access to align_image_stack these days, or a better/smarter way to align a big stack of images?

Thanks!

[kofa (István Kovács)]

See

Beware: Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish

I recently started using enfuse to do focus stacking. Not particularly interested in development or new features, I just installed the Ubuntu package and went on my merry way. Recently have been getting pop-up dialogs about upgrading to “Jammy Jellyfish” (I think they’re running out of African animals at Canonical). I’d been clicking to upgrade and having it do nothing for about a month now, then yesterday it all of a sudden decided to work. Off it went, doing the usual upgrade things, one of…

This worked for me:
https://software.opensuse.org/download/package?package=hugin&project=home%3Apmdpalma%3AUbuntu%3Abucket

This did not, but maybe it has been fixed:

Apps : Panda Jim

[kofa (István Kovács)]

And on the command-line you may want to pick a base image, and align the others against that in batches. So instead of processing thousands of images, pick 1 + 10, then 10 more and so on.

[clepsydrae]

Thanks! That first link seems dead now (?) but the second one seems to have worked for me (so far, anyway!)

Re: the batches of 10 – are you saying: align in groups of 10, then combine the results of that alignment, then align the resulting images, or some similar hierarchical/recursive method?

I was planning to use --use-given-order with align_image_stack, which as I understand just compares adjacent-in-the-file-list images, but I’ve always wondered how that could work without risking compounding errors over the whole stack.