Normal photo-stitching software?

Question

Please, recommend photo stitching software that really works?

1. Its primary goal should be stitching, not creating panoramas. By stitching I mean determining correspondent points and laying out images over some coordinate system.

2. Should be able to determine points automatically with modern feature detection algorithms. If it is unable to detect points automatically it should allow to set them manually well, i.e. at modern multilayer vector editor level, not at school project level.

3. It should be able to handle not overlapped images and images without control points, for example if we have images from two opposite windows.

Answer 1

Hugin is a tool-chain that allows you to stitch photographs together and despite it the use of the word Panorama in the title bar it does not just do panoramas.

To cover your points:

1. Its primary goal should be stitching, not creating panoramas. By stitching I mean determining correspondent points and laying out images over some coordinate system. Yes your pictures can be in any order and any layout including grids and there are numerous projection systems that you can use to map to differing coordinate systems.

2. Should be able to determine points automatically with modern feature detection algorithms. If it is unable to detect points automatically it should allow to set them manually well, i.e. at modern multilayer vector editor level, not at school project level. Yes There are multiple control point detection algorithms and then you can manually override them and/or add them. ,

3. It should be able to handle not overlapped images and images without control points, for example if we have images from two opposite windows. Yes you can set arbitrary control points and non-contiguous images.

Other Features

1. Free, Gratis & Open Source
2. Cross Platform - Windows, OS-X & Linux
3. International - Several language translations are available and everything is Unicode so whatever language is desired it could be done.
4. As well as simple stitching it can do:
   1. corrections for different lenses
   2. generation of lens calibration
   3. focus stacking
   4. exposure stacking with alignment correction
   5. HDR creation
   6. Image coordinate translations
   7. Exposure corrections
   8. Blend Masks to include/exclude specific parts of each image from the final output.
   9. Various cropping options.
5. Lots of on-line helps and tutorials.