The practical benefit of this move is that larger images can now be processed safely; late in the 0.5 series of MTF Mapper you could cause it to crash by feeding it a 100 MP image. While it is possible to rework some of MTF Mapper's code to use substantially less memory (e.g., some of the algorithms can be run in a sliding-window fashion rather than whole-image-at-a-time, and I could add some on-the-fly compression in other places), it just seemed like much less work to switch to 64-bit Windows binaries.
That being said, if there is sufficient demand, I am willing to build 32-bit binaries occasionally.
There are quite a few new things in the 0.6 series of MTF Mapper (check the Settings dialog of the GUI):
- Fully automatic radial distortion correction using only one image (preferably of an MTF Mapper test chart, but anything with black trapezoidal targets on a white background will work). Enabling this feature slows down the processing quite a bit, so I do not recommend using this by default. More on this in an upcoming blog article.
- Correction of equiangular (f-theta) fisheye lens images.
- Correction of stereographic fisheye lens images.
I plan on posting an article or two on these new features, so stay tuned!
