I recently tried to make a "360 photo" out of a series of images. I put my tripod in the center of the room and took almost 300 photos, with plenty of overlap (35mm lens on a Nikon DX body).
Then I went and loaded them in Hugin. It started fine, but then it wanted to match every image to every other image. So i decided to reduce the resolution of the photos (from 6 to 1 megapixels), and only process half of the photos. So I discarded all the odd number filenames. This made the process much quicker but when it got to the panorama preview... it was a mess. A lot of mismatched points, images upside down, points not detected. I messed around for a few hours, trying different combinations of settings, and it was no better.
So after adding a few more points manually the panorama started to take shape, but it was still a mess.
So i just downloaded the trial version of Autopano. Installed it and in less than 2 minutes it processed the full image set (300 images) and made a perfect panorama on the first try.
What's going on here? Did I use a different profile, setting, or is it just the algorithm on Autopano being superior to Hugin's?
(FWIW: I am familiar with feature detection and matching. I am the person who made this video, where I match features in real time against 20 thousand images only using a Core 2 Duo)