Stitching Murals in Hugin and Removing Obstructions

Before diving into this tutorial, I’d like to thank the following posts and their authors:

• Hugin tutorial — Stitching flat scanned images
• Hugin tutorial — Stitching murals using mosaic mode
• Linear Panoramas (Mosaic) Tutorial
• Creating linear panoramas with Hugin

The above posts armed me with the knowledge and techniques needed to go out there and shoot some really cool looking murals, while teaching me what I needed to create the below video.

Even though this example is relatively simple, it’s possible to create mosaic style stitches using different lenses, varying zoom levels, or even different cameras! You can also use as many source images as you’d like, as long as they can all be connected by control points, and some of the images can be used to define the horizontal and vertical lines in the overall composition.

Below is my video on stitching a mural I saw in La Mesa Village near San Diego, California. The mural depicts one of the nearby Fire Stations, and I wanted to see it without the palm tree in front of it. Using the technique originally learned by reading the above tutorial titled: Stitching murals using mosaic mode by Terry Duell, I was able to remove the palm tree using only two different photos of the wall.

Remember when stitching photos in Hugin; always use the full, uncropped versions of the photos. For this tutorial, I’ve included the JPEG versions of the original fisheye images for you to experiment with.

More Complex Flat Stitching

Far more complex stitches are possible with this technique. I recently wrote a story on 500px about how I stitched a much more complex mural and removed the street lamp and traffic control box from in front of it. If you liked this tutorial, please leave a comment and let me know what else you would like to see.