Panorama Tools (also known as PanoTools) are a suite of programs and libraries for image stitching, i.e., re-projecting and blending multiple source images into immersive panoramas of many types. It was originally written by German physics and mathematics professor Helmut Dersch. Panorama Tools provides a framework An updated version of the Panorama Tools library serves as the underlying core engine for many software panorama graphical user interface front ends. History Dersch started development on Panorama Tools in 1998, producing software available for creating panoramas and more, but had to stop development in 2001 due to legal harassment and claims of patent infringement by the company IPIX. Dersch released the core library (pano12) and some of the programs of Panorama Tools under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The rest of the applications were made available as binary executables only and for free without a copyleft license. The development of the source code of Panorama Tools was continued by some members of the original Panorama Tools mailing list. In December 2003 they initiated a free software project which is currently hosted by SourceForge. SourceForge requires that all hosted software is released under an open source license. For this reason Dersch's unlicensed binaries are not hosted there, although they can still be found on mirror websites. On 5 August 2007, Dersch announced his intention to relicense the Panorama Tools source code. On 9 August 2007, Dersch changed the license to a GNU Lesser General Public License. Sub-components Original release PanoTools consists of the following components: PTEditor Java interactive panorama editor. PTPicker Java front end to panorama stitcher and other tools. It provides a graphical interface for feature point selection and position optimization. PTCrypt Java tool for scrambling pictures intended to be viewed on-line with PTViewer. PTStitcher Panorama stitching tool which remaps, adjusts and combines arbitrary images to panoramic views. PTOptimizer† Optimizes positions and sizes of images using control-point data. PTStereo Creates 3-dimensional objects from 2 or more stereoscopic images. PTInterpolate Physically valid true view interpolator. Given two images of the same scene taken from different positions, this tool creates views from any intermediate position. PTMorpher Morphing tool. PTAverage Averages images to reduce noise and enhance density. PTStripe Combines images into movie-stripes for viewing in object-viewers (PTMovie extension to PTViewer). PanoTools PluginsPhotoshop, GraphicConverter and GIMP plug-ins for image correction and remapping. Also compatible to many other programs that can use Photoshop