In message , Jeff Liebermann
writes
On Tue, 26 May 2009 02:53:06 -0500, msg wrote:

Have you used any of them to stitch 1bpp scans of schematics?

No. The problem is that I have access to a nifty overpriced Canon
document scanner and overpriced software that scans directly to PDF.
It also has a reader, which makes the resultant text indexable. The
problem is that it doesn't have a stitching feature for the
schematics. There is software available that will stitch PDF files,
but I've never bothered to try any. In the distant past, I did stitch
some JPG schematic scans with Irfanview, but the resultant distortion
at the seams was deemed unacceptable. Irfanview wasn't really
designed to do stitching anyway. No clue on the MS installer.

I have no idea what you mean by "large" number of "high-resolution"
images. Some numbers would be nice.

Well, a typical 'large' collection for me would be eight 1600dpi 8.5x11
1bpp scans; I imagine that with a simple photo editor, I would work with
two at a time.

No. I would work with all 8 images at the same time. Canon
PhotoStitch is typical. I line up the images in the order in which I
want them stitched. I then define the borders if necessary. Punch
"run" and wait a while. My guess(tm) is that Canon PhotoStitch would
take about 10 minutes max to do your 8 photos. Panorama factory takes
perhaps twice as long, and even slower when I use it to correct for
image distortion. However, the results are superior and worth the
wait.

I've stitched together about 30 images, consisting of 8 megapixel 24
bit BMP images using Panorama Factory without difficulties. The
result was something like a 1.5 Gigabyte file size. It also took
about an hour on my ancient PIII/1GHz. The latest version supports 64
bit processors, which may work better if your images are truely huge
and numerous or possibly hitting a 2GByte file size limit.

Sounds faster than what I am getting using 'hugin', whose optimizer only
has selections for SSE and number of CPUs; if I can figure out how to get
it to 'nudge' the joins instead of blending, I would expect that it would
work faster.

Dunno. I don't think that blending is the problem. When I splice two
JPG's together, I usually let the program do the blending and
straightening. When done, I convert it to 1bpp or more commonly 4bpp
to improve the contrast using Irfanview. The conversion is almost
instantaneous.

If speed is the major problem, perhaps adding some RAM to your
PIII/700 would help. Image editing software, including stitching,
does take quite a bit of RAM for array and scratch space. For XP SP3,
I suggest 1GB as a minimum.

For what it's worth. I use Autostich for my photographs. It's really
very good. It's freeware, but expires after about 9 months (seems to
vary a lot), and has to be re-downloaded and re-installed. However, I
haven't really tried it for diagrams.
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
--
Ian