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Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier
megas writes "Max Lyons has just posted on his site what seems to be the first 1 Gigapixel picture, created from 196 separate photographs taken with a 6 megapixel digital camera, and then stitched together into one seamless composite. According to Max, he has 'been unable to find any record of a higher resolution photographic (i.e. non-scientific) digital image that has been created without resizing a smaller, lower resolution image or using an interpolated image.'"
All I can see is a 800x526 jpeg.
If I ran his site I'd either trim the star attraction down to a thumbnail-formerly-known-as-gigapixel shot or redirect all Slashdot referrals to goatse...
Wah!
That appears to be a demo of the new virtual-colonoscopy technique that's on all the news sites lately.
That picture is amazing. I asked the photographer to email me a copy of the original but I haven't been able to access my mail server for hours. ;)
That's very cool, you can actually see the guy standing across the canyon!
Max Lyons
;)
Did this guy switch over to his porn name or what?
And speaking of porn, how 'bout that gigapixel picture, eh?
Max Lyons has just posted on his site what it seems to be the first 1 Gigapixel picture, created from 196 separate photographs taken with a 6 megapixel digital camera, and then stitched together into one seamless composite.
And thus became the first person to ever be slashdotted by only one visitor.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Is to print each one of them on a separate sheet of paper, and tape them together?
The nation can rest, confident that we were the first to break the dreaded Gigapixel barrier. God speed, Max Lyon.
So, how many of those can I take with the 8MB CF card that came with my camera?
He has never seen a scanner, I presume.
I'm sure this has been done before...
Heck, what about the image of the Earth without any clouds taken over months at a time and stitched together? How big is that sucker?
sigh
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Connect the dots - lalala
The guy said he needed a subject that was relatively static. But shadows on a canyon wall are not static. He says it took him 13 minutes. I wonder if there was any noticeable movement in the shadows in that time?
Where can we get the uncompressed, uncropped picture? Sure, it'd be big but I've got a DVD burner.
The image "http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/gigapixel_strip .jpg" cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
At least, Mozilla couldn't display it. I wonder if it's merely too wide.
A gigapixel "Where's Waldo" would drive thousands insane.
Trolling is a art,
so... Uhmm... I looked at the picture, and where is the naked chick?
I use a billion monkeys, each looking at one particular bit of a scenery, then I tell them to line up and take turn at the keyboard, to type what they saw in emacs (the favorite monkey editor, it requires a lot of dexterity), and compile a very large XPM file.
...
So what? this guy just figured out a way not to deal with a billion bananas and hundreds of tons of chimp shit. Big deal
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
'he has "...been unable to find any record of a higher resolution photographic (i.e. non-scientific) digital image that has been created without resizing a smaller, lower resolution image or using an interpolated image."' Uncanny that - perhaps its because we dont need them yet.
(using freecache to not toast my own webserver)
Harald
Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier
(Last Updated: November 28, 2003)
Introduction. This page contains what I believe to be one of the highest resolution, most detailed stitched digital images ever created. It is the view from Bryce Point in Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. It consists of 196 separate photographs taken with a 6 megapixel digital camera, and then stitched together into one seamless composite. The final image is 40,784 x 26,800 pixels in size, and contains about 1.09 billion pixels...a little more than one gigapixel. I have been unable to find any record of a higher resolution photographic (i.e. non-scientific) digital image that has been created without resizing a smaller, lower resolution image or using an interpolated image.
Resized version of 1.09 gigapixel image after stitching
How was it created? The first step in the creation of the image was to choose an appropriate subject. There are a number of technical issues that I had to consider that are not normally encountered when taking single images. For example, it took me 13 minutes simply to take all the photographs, and I was shooting as fast as my camera could write images to its memory card. So, I needed a subject that was relatively static. Secondly, I knew that I would have to use a very long focal length lens to take the image, otherwise the final composite would end up with an extremely wide field of view...something I didn't want. This also presented challenges due to the extremely short depth of field when using very long lenses.
The second step was to assemble the images. This was a complex and lengthy process. My normal procedure (using PTAssembler, Panorama Tools and Photoshop) was not sufficient in this case for a number of reasons because of the size and number of images I was working with. For example, the version of Photoshop that I use cannot work with images with pixel dimensions of more than 30,000. So, my solution was to modify some of the existing programs in my workflow, and write a number of new software programs to create this image.
196 component images before stitching
Technical Details. Here are some facts and figures about this image:
* Final image dimensions: 40,784 x 26,800 pixels
* Number of pixels in final image: 1,093,011,200 (1.09 gigapixel)
* Final image file format: RGB Tiff using deflate compression
* Final image file size: 2,068,654,055 bytes
* Number of source images: 196
* Number of pixels in source images: 1,233,125,376 (196 images * 3072*2048)
* Lens focal length: 280mm (equivalent to 450mm on a 35mm camera)
* Aperture: F9. Shutter speed: 1/400
* Number of control points in PTAssembler project: 779
* Number of seams that were manually blended after stitching: 364
* Horizontal field of view of final image: 63 degrees
* Time required to capture component images: 13 minutes
* Time required to set control points: 2 hours
* Time required to optimize project: 2 days
* Time required to stitch project: 4 days
* Time required to blend seams / correct misalignments / finalize image: 3 days
How much detail does it contain? Much, much more than would be captured by any conventional digital camera...even those that cost more than a new car. For example, the Canon 1Ds (about $8,000) captures 11 megapixels, while the BetterLight Super 10K-2 scanning back (camera not included!) captures 140 megapixels, but costs about $25,000. I also believe that a gigapixel image surpasses what even die-hard admirers of large format photography argue is possible with large format cameras. For more thoughts on this subject, you might also want to read this essay.
Here's another way to think about it. Given that the resolving power of the human eye (under ideal conditions at the center of the retina) is about 1 arcminute (1/60th of one degree), this image captures considerably more detail than I (or any other normal sighted human) was able to see w
To make a monitor large enough to use that picture as it's background.
That's relatively nifty. I wish s/he would have put up a little more on the actual process for stitching so many images together. I can't imagine the amount of RAM (well, I can) necessary...
mix_master_mike
vafrous
"The image "http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/gigapixel_strip .jpg" cannot be displayed, because it contains errors"
Some jpeg limitation in Mozilla or plain slashdotting or what?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I'll have the 1.000000001 Gigapixel picture ready later today.
step 1: fake a 1 gigapixel picture step 2: ??? step 3: profit I bet this is a fake people, don't get taken
I've been staring at the center of the picture from a few inches away, but I just cannot seem to see the Tux figure in it.
He likes to do a lot of stitching. Maybe he is an ass stitcher?
I don't think even a Carl Zeiss lens can actually resolve a billion pixels, but it's worth a shot. Isn't it?
His picture still contains interpolation unless he built his own camera. Current cameras that are advertised as n-megapixels really only have n/4 of each of the red and blue pixels and n/2 green pixels. Using the term "pixel" to count each of the red/green/blue subpixels separately is "highly creative marketing" to say the least.
At least it would, if Seagate/Maxtor/WD/Samsung could get their way.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Why Bother? Good question. The short answer is "why not?"
Money, relationships, video games, books, tv...
I'm surprised to see that the adult film industry, previously at the forefront in digital-imaging technology has fallen behind here.
Well, at ~2 gigabytes per frame, even an 18gb DVD would only last 1/3rd of a second.
I should imagine that in the world of porn, that would be shall we say, unfulfilling?
after all that patient work, stitching and blending and doing everything manually for days, he realized he had left the lens cap on ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The resulting stitched image is a 1 gigapixel image.
You'll be waiting 20 years before you see a 1 gigapixel camera.
Quoth: Final image file size: 2,068,654,055 bytes
How big would that be as a JPEG?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
And, man, wait 'til the pr0n industry gets ahold of this.
Gets a hold of what? Pasting pictures together? I hear Microsoft is working on something for that. They call it "MS Paint."
New and Improves 1 Gigapixel Goatse, Now with such features as: Improved visibility! More Glands! AND MUCH, MUCH MORE!
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
Well, golly. sbeast702 doesn't think it's a gigapixel image, and he's so clever that he (and only he) knows the subtle ways in which using photoshop magically transforms an image with one billion pixels into something else besides a gigapixel image. Oh, how I wish I could understand such esoteric things. Ah to be the sbeast702 . . .
But wait, what's that?! sbeast702, in his haste to get a FP, failed to read any of the article at all. For had he, he would have noted the author's lament that he could not use photoshop at all because his version limits the canvas to 30k pixels in any dimension, which is far too small for this image with 1 billion pixels which, somehow, is not a gigapixel image because sbeast702 says so.
STFU karma whore.
everything in moderation
They seem to have more than a few gigapixels of imagery. I'm sure they did a mosaic of some sort to get the imagery into their system.
Heck, what about the image of the Earth without any clouds taken over months at a time and stitched together? How big is that sucker?
The trick is the caveat of a non-scientific image. Pfft. Big freaking deal. All he did was make a mosaic of existing photo images. Why don't I hammer together all of my digital manga collection and call it the first 10 Gigapixel scanner image?
This is nothing. I work regularly with scientific datasets larger than this. I just recently had to fix a memory leak bug exposed by a customer who was trying to mosaic together 6 GB of satellite imagery together in the product I work with.
This is a total non-accomplishment, especially if the software he was using was already tested and working with >2 GB output. Call us back when a single sensor does this.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
... and can't download such a huge picture. Could someone condense it down a bit and send me a copy?
Infuriate left and right
has any other 'work' begged more for erasure?
~/maxlyons> rm gigapixel_junk.jpg
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I myself hold many pointless records, as far as I have been able to verify:
* Most pencils held on face while facing south-southeast and humming Kraftwerk's "The Robots" - 8
* Largest lint ball created from other, smaller lintballs found on blue and green sweaters given for Christmas 1996 - 3.5" (diameter)
* Most drawn-out, sarcastic post ever by me - this one
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Thats an interesting question. At 1.09 megapixels he says that it would be 11 feet long at 300ppi. The only thing I've ever experimented with was a panarama with my 2.1 megapixel camera where I stiched in photoshop and printed on 11 8.5x11 sheets of paper from a color leser printer and taped together after cutting off the margins. It didnt look all that great considering the resolution, but from a far its nice. too bad you cant get a 11'x1' frame.
What are your ideas on how to print this thing. No, i dont think a plotter would do it.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Inter fucking net explorer can open this, WAY TO GO OPERA - which can't!
Damn.
Well, maybe not death. Slight joint-pain. How about that?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Images like this are common in GIS applications, often orthorectified product stitched into a seamless continuous image map of massive areas of terrain, these images are vast, far in excess of a gigapixel.
http://airphotousa.com/
Some even generate even larger contiguous image sets at multiple resolutions from these data sources:
http://www.earthviewer.com/
This is a perfect background image for my new 128000x102400 resolution monitor!
Frankly, as one who *just* joined the Dark Side by purchasing a Digital Rebel, I'm impressed.
For you naysayers, this particular gorgeous image is *begging* to be blown up to 30x50 inches or even more, IMHO.
When (not if) I figure out the stitching software (it's a little non-intuitive to me), my 4x5 is going on ebay!
I wish the learning curve for image manipulation wasn't so steep - I'd love to collaborate on a GIMP plugin to do stitching...
Mark
I think most people feel like 6MP is enough, since it's probably equivalent or better than 35mm film. In fact I don't even use the "large" or RAW settings on my 10D for most stuff .. "medium" is fine (what is that, like 4MP and some minor jpeg noise?) .
.. "well what if somebody came out with "6 minute abs"?
What I want is a huge color gamut, 16bpp to make sure the colors are smooth, and zero noise.
This gigapixel thing reminds me of that "7 minute abs" joke
Tomorrow, Giga+1 pixels....
This guy need a little education about interpolation. Due to multiplexed color elements, a 6-megapixel camera is only generating a color image which is at best about half as large (i.e. 3 megapixels). The picture you get out is 6 megapixels due to interpolation.
CV
Wow, we've accomplished digital resolution comparable to 1940s film technology. Yawn.
Since he's /.ed I can't verify what he actually has, BUT a friend of mine routinely works on PhotoShop files that are at or over a gig.
I built him a new machine a couple of years ago to speed up his artwork. PIII-933, 768MB of Ram, 64MB Geforce card, 40GB HDD. He says he is ready for a nother new one in Spring as this one improved his situation by about half of what he really wanted.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
1/3 of a second? Wow, I could be finished and dried my hand in that time.
Bring the gigapixel pr0n on!!!
unable to find any record of a higher resolution photographic (i.e. non-scientific) digital image that has been created without resizing a smaller, lower resolution image or using an interpolated image.
Why not throw in resampled and stretched as well? How about expanded or even made bigger too?
...
well, your dvd has only half res for colour, too. Even your TV. IIRC even HDTV. And nobody cries "but dvd has only 352x288, the 704x576 is only for grayscale..."
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
0.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'd be just fine with that.
:(
Maybe that's why I can't get a date.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Instead of using alot of cameras , how about using a just a few to scan a landscape by moving the camera focus ? I have seen these types sold for panoramic images .
Panoramic google links
How to shoot panoramic nature photos
Now consider the fact that these photos were stitched together SIDE by SIDE. What does that make the resolution of each small piece? 6 megapixels. Does adding up individual photograph resolutions give the overall resolution of the resulting picture? I don't think so.
I think the overall resolution is still 6megapixels.
I made seamless aerial photos for the whole state of OK.
The secret:
Assign latitude/longitude coordinates to a corner of the image, and then edge-match them with the geographic location of each image.
As an additional bonus, you can overlay GPS points and other spatial data directly on top of the imagery.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Not to mention the 429,000X drive you'd need...
This is pretty close:
SLiVR
Since this takes a 1/2 gigapixel panoramic image in "one shot," it is more impressive than stitching 196 images together.
Stitching 196 images together is an interesting stunt, but it is not practical.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
Stitching all of those pictures together.
The submitter obviously doesn't work at a University, where they'd drastically simplify the process. Instead of just using one camera to construct the image, they'd buy 196 digital cameras, make a cluster out of them, maintain a staff of undergraduate students to keep the cluster working, and then complain about their picture-scheduling software losing shots. But once they got the cluster in the right location to take the picture, it would only take them a few minutes to take and process the picture, a huge performance increase over the days required using one camera.
paintball
All you have to do is take a low resolution picture, and then use that software they use on almost every TV show to sharpen it and bring in details that weren't in the original photo.
I've got a $2900 Epson Expression 1640XL large-format flatbed scanner at work. (Not sure if the link will work for y'all...looks like it uses cookies...if not, just go to their site and click on Scanners.) The optical resolution is 1600dpi and the scanning bed is 13" x 19". Even at the maximum resolution of 1600dpi, the images are tack-sharp--it's almost like looking through a microscope.
At 1600dpi, the theoretical maximum image size is 20800 x 30400, or approximately 632 megapixels. Photoshop 7 reports that a 20800 x 30000 (it only goes up to 30000 pixels) RGB image would be 1.74 GB.
So, if you could expose a large enough piece of film (there's an optional transparency adapter), scan an original piece of art, or convert the scanner into some kind of mega-scanning-back camera, you could get some damn impressive images out of it, I'd think.
I've never tried scanning such a large image with it--don't have enough RAM--but with the FireWire interface, it'd probably be a lot faster than stitching all of those digicam images together.
Fastest.......slashdot.......ever.... What did the OP expect?
'Nuff said.
The Commies are pumping billions into Terrapixel research. There can not be a terrapixel gap!
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
does anyone know if there is something like this for linux? i saw a reference to a stitching plugin for the gimp. is there anything else like this which works well in linux?
-- john
He says that he has trouble printing it out. Sorry but as aprinter I find that hard to believe. He could send the file (on DVD) to any large format output shop near him and get it output. Let's see 40,784 x 26,800 pixels printed at 300dpi is ~ 136 x 90 inches. If he wants it to be better resolution at 600dpi (which just about every modern large format printer runs at) he would be 68 x 45 inches. This is interesting from the digital perspective but not from the traditional printing perspective. Putting a 2 gig file through a RIP is a pain in the ass but is still done on a regular basis at print shops in any town. Has anyone ever seen a billboard by any chance????
Stay tuned for new sig...
It's too bad he didn't post a link to the full file. That would make for a most thorough slashdotting!
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Only cebids would use Emacs and callatrichids would use vi. We Apes would use vile! The rest of the Old world monkeys are our chattel so who cares what they use! Back to work, you filthy macaque!
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Do not open this with MSPaint. Your PC will lock up for 3 days, then popup message will say "Install Linux to view image." You will know fear. You will know pain. And then you will crash. (mangled B5/JMS quote)
Ansel Adams just got friggin' OWNED!
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
has finally entered the realm of kitsch online tourism
this our largest ball of twine on route 66
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually, it's kinda sad-- Max doesn't post any of his originals anywhere, because the bandwidth would eat him alive. His site has hundreds of panoramic stitch images, at much-reduced size to let you browse the collection for free. But now he's facing a slashdotting. If you're a fan of his art, I suggest you wait a week, find a photo you really enjoy, and BUY A PRINT from him.
[
Has anyone got a cache of this as ASCII art or something?
unless your browser won't choke on a 14MB jpg (and most will), I suggest downloading, it's amazing.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
hello anonymous coward... what's happening?
uhhhhh... we got sort of a problem here... yeaah... you appearantly didn't put one of the new GNAA advertisements on your first post.
mmmh... yeahh.. you see, we're putting the GNAA advertisements on all first posts now before they go out. did you see the memo about this?
so if you could just go ahead and make sure you do that from now on, that would be great.
and i'll go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that text. mmmmkay?
Call me crazy, but it looks like 72dpi to me.
Why shouldn't you consider it a "true picture"? Many astronomical and other scientific (sonar, radar, etc.) images are formed in this way (such as the popular Horsehead Nebula image taken by the Hubble telescope). Also, many very high detailed photos use some sort of mechanical process to take seperate images and later do some processing to combine them. If done correctly, there is no difference in quality between this method and an instantaneous one (at least for quasi-static scenes). Using a mechanical measure to determine what is or isn't a "true picture" seems rather arbitrary and silly to me.
The new Photoshop CS (nee 8) breaks the 30,000 pixel barrier. Of course I realize you've been too busy out shooting and stitching to upgrade yet.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This is a bit of a plug, but it's on topic. I put together an image serving website that could handle images up to about 70 "Gigipixels" We were using images from a microscope. http://www.neuroinformatica.com/
-Jim
Celebrate Excellence!
Google Cache to the rescue!
If the photos dont show up, refresh the picture, and it should load.
Or has he duplicated slightly in the lower right hand corner of the image? Back to square one...
This gigapixel picture thing DOES amount to monkeys looking at a bit of scenery.
The fundamental flaw here is that the *pixel rating of a normal camera is usually on a similar type of camera or lens. That means that (roughly standard lens)/(number of pixels) gives you RESOLUTION.
Resolution is what we care about when we hear that a camera is 2 megapixels or whatever. It means you have a better quality camera.
If I wanted a BIG photo, made up of lots of tiny ones, I'd buy a security camera that can pan and tilt by remote control. Then, the computer could make TERRApixel images. But what use would that be?
Pfft. This guy is a fraud. Or a dumb-ass.
The image on the web page was 800x526. I did not find a link to a downloadable 1,060,000,000 pixel image. I didn't find pieces of that image to download. I would like to see more details of Bryce Canyon. I would like to see the whole thing even though my monitor would choke. Based on the credibility of the writer I trust it exists. But, with pictures, seeing is believing WHERE'S THE BEEF?
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
You also said it wasn't a gigapixel image, because it was an image, digitally manipulated and assembled, and errr....uhh....weighed in at over 1 gigapixel. Care to speculate as to just WHAT THE FUCK IT IS? Would 1000 megapixel be better?
I guess the Photoshop misnomber is somewhat understandable, but the rest of your post led us to believe you are not a higly functioning individual, probably a troll, and clearly didn't RTFA. Subsequent replies aren't helping so far.
Let's see. Assume total number of pixels increase every 18 months (Moore's law, of sorts, but I'm not entirely sure if that should be applied to total pixels or in one dimension only). Highest resolution generally available is say 10M, so we need an increase of about 100x, or about 6.6 x 18 months = 9.9 months. Not even 10 years!
lighten up mods, you know that was funny!
everything in moderation
Okay, the guy says it took him THIRTEEN MINUTES to take 196 images, a feat in itself! Now, consider that our pal Max had to align each image so that the left hand of each frame aligned perfectly with the right hand of the previous frame and the top of the image with bottom of the one above... 196 times in 13 minutes.
I say this Max guy must be a robot of some sort to be able to steadily increment and shoot at consistent intervals like that.
"The Borba"
so excuse the PR'y nature of the article.
UBC computer science student's research leads to new software that can build digital panoramas automatically
UBC computer science PhD candidate Matthew Brown, 25, has developed panorama software with a new object recognition feature that surpasses the capability of panorama-building software currently on the market.
Brown's AutoStitch Panorama software can automatically recognize and match images that are similar. The software then "stitches" the images together to create a seamless panoramic view of up to 360 degrees. All the user has to do is download their digital photos from their camera.
The software's ability to automatically recognize unordered image sets represents a major step forward in object recognition and computer vision, says Brown's supervisor Professor David Lowe, a leading researcher in the field.
With currently available Panorama software, photos have to be carefully taken in a fixed sequence, downloaded and then manually identified and aligned by the computer user. It's a process that takes time and some technical expertise.
With Autostitch Panorama, the matching process is fully automated - and quick. A standard PC takes about three minutes to match and register all images and then render the panorama. Brown, a native of Manchester, England, is hoping to improve on that time in the future.
Brown and Lowe built on Lowe's previous research to create the Autostitch software, which uses a probabilistic model to detect and verify similarities to match the images and then automatically stitch them into the panoramic view.
Brown is set to present a paper on the research, entitled Recognizing Panoramas, for the first time at the 10th International Conference on Computer Vision in Nice, France, October 13-16.
Sample images produced by AutoStitch Panorama software can be viewed at www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/panorama/panorama.html.
As with the Panorama software currently on the market, the final composite image is a computer graphic that allows the user to explore the panorama by simply dragging the mouse around the image. Images can also be mapped to the surface of a sphere or cylinder to provide a 360-degree photograph. While no special camera is required, one restriction the researchers hope to overcome in the near future is to enable the software to match images of one scene taken from a multitude of locations.
Currently a photographer can't move around snapping photos from multiple locations and use this software. If the pair master that problem, they will have achieved something that 20 years of research in this area has yet to conquer.
For now, they're hoping an outside company will licence the software and develop it further for commercial use. Virtual tourism websites and online walkthroughs of interiors to sell real estate are just two practical applications where Panorama software is already in use.
After Brown returns from the Nice conference, he will be heading to Microsoft and a four-month internship with Rick Szeliski, a pioneer in this area of computer science research.
The UBC Department of Computer Science is a dynamic, youthful, and growing community renowned internationally for its excellence and depth of research. Recognized for teaching innovation, the Department places a conscious focus on interdisciplinary programs. There are approximately 900 undergraduates, 185 graduate students and 41 full time faculty.
PanoTools: the only (?) image stitching tool available for Linux. Looks pretty powerful, although not as automated as some.
I believe that the author of the article used the Windows version (among other things).
A 300ppi print of this image would measure about 11 feet wide
I just wouldn't want to pay his inkjet cart bill.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It may not be gigapixel in size, but have you seen the detail in the Playboy centerfold images that require a plug-in viewer to see them? Too bad it doesn't work without a Windows-specific plugin (and a cyber-club membership), but it is some of the highest resolution pr0n I've seen.
352x288 is ONE QUARTER of 704x576, and 4:2:0 colour subsampling doesn't even give you that.
That was classic intercourse!
Depends on the quality setting, obviously. At reasonable quality (ie, without loosing much detail) it would probably still be hundreds of megs.
Stolen from Steven Wright! Please credit sources.
-Phat Tony.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
maybe even in ten years we can get a picture of Senator Ted Kennedy's ego
on what do you base this assumption?
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
The author mentions large-format cameras. Here is a link to a lowcost large-format camera project, built by cannibalizing a 1200dpi scanner to make a 122 megapixel camera.
Now, who's going to confirm this?
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Gimp-1.3.22 (what I had installed) has no problem either - it opens the example strip, and I can create a 262144x10 picture at least. A 262144x262144 RGB picture requires 512gig, that seems to be the limit. (That is 68 gigapixels btw)
I haven't tried the latest version of photoshop, but when working on 50+ megapixel pictures I found using Gimp under Linux a bit less of a pain than Photoshop under Windows.
Except they're already running out of ways of making the sensors small enough. Sure companies keep coming up with different tricks and methods to develop finer sensors but there is a definate limit.
Everything on the Mac seems to use the Quicktime API's for its image handeling, and like Photoshop, it caps pictures to 30,000 pixels sqaure. Does anyone know of any image viewer for Mac that doesn't?
Here I am, with "The Graphic Arts Machine" on my desk, and I can't view a JPEG. OK, ok, it's sort of a big JPEG, but still.
Thanks for any useful sugestions,
Phat Tony.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
"Sexy mitochondria shakin' that ass, shakin' that ass, shakin' that ass
Sexy mitochondria shakin' that ass, shakin' that ass, shakin' that ass"
Great tune.
I opened it in a new tab and it displays the first 3/4 horizontally fine, then it clips to white. Still I was happy that it opened up ok.
Other browsers?
At CERN they use cameras with more than 256M Pixel for their experiments - _this_ really rocks.
:)
Putting the Photo together like this is rather boring
Or a were are the WMD's on an Iraq image.
we were told they are there!
I signed up and downloaded the files (300 MB each, as TIF with LZW Compression, Eastern and Western Hemisphere). I stitched the two together (photoshop 8 only) and created a file that had pixel dimensions of 43,200 x 21,600 (2.6 GB uncompressed). And each pixel is equivalent to about 1/2 mile. Not enough for any true detail at high magnification, but fun to scroll around on.
This translates to a file 12' by 6' at 300 dpi, overkill to say the least. But we printed it out at 4' by 8' here at work and used it as decoration for a blank wall. An incredibly impressive piece of art.
A small (600x600 pixel) cut of California at 100 percent
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
It's too bad the creator of the image didn't show what sort of resolution you could get using normal film. Even with the progress of digital cameras, I think we're still far from that sort of quality.
I gotta have more cowbell.
I know that this is going to be marked as a troll, but....
ok, good for Max Lyons for doing this, but is this really news? seriously, if this picture should be worthy of anything, it should be that of a contest, not the fact that it is a gigapixel picture. anybody can do what he did (maybe not as artistically).
I have access to a couple 6-MP SLR cameras, does this mean that I can take many pictures of a wall or something else which doesn't change over time with the camera positioned perfectly; write up a program to stitch a ton of these pictures together, and then post something on the interent about being the first person to create a 1 terapixel (I know that this is getting near impossible with a 6-MP camera, also, I'd need a big freaking wall with a good macro lens).
Not that this picture isn't nice, but what it's being posted for in my opionion is just stupid. Once they get a 1-GP camera, that will take my attention, but somebody just stitching pictures together isn't anything special.
--
CowboyNeal, this posts for you!
-isolenz
You may describe the cameras in any fashion that suits you based on your own naive and limited understanding of how things actually work. It's the overall image quality that matters in any event. Meanwhile, cameras will continue to be measured by how many photosites they have regardless of your technical concerns.
How would you explain a camera's measured ability to resolve 1500 horizontal lines in only 3000 pixels if those 3000 pixels were only the result of "creative marketing"? What would Nyquist have to say? Perhaps you should study Bayer pattern imaging a little closer before you spout off.
huge mosaics (paper, videos, presentation)
i s. html
http://graphics.lcs.mit.edu/~neel/omnivis/omniv
If I read the details correctly, you could create a gigapixel image by scanning an 8x10 at a very high resolution. It would require about 5000ppi for an 8x10, but you could simply scan an 11x17 at 3200ppi as well. Both of these would result in a gigapixel image, digitally created.
Of course, it would need to be TRUE resolution, non-interpolated, but I think there may be high end scanning devices that can do this these days.
Such an image would fit the requirements stated and be far easier to produce...no stitching!
So I won't.
All I can say is I get to play with all that mapping data. I feel important for someone who's 70000 dollars in debt.
God spoke to me
Speaking of very large images, does anybody have a link to some really hi-res fractal images? (I am looking for something to decorate a 3m*5m wall...)
great one
A 4.3 megapixel camera contains 4.3 x 10^6 pixels. That number does NOT refer to "pixels per square inch." The actual cmos (or ccd) sensor in a 4.3 megapixel camera is smaller than a square inch, much smaller.
The photos were stitched together side by side. That means that the final photo has 6 megapixels per shot times 196 shots. Which equals over a gigapixel.
Your concept of resolution is incorrect. Resolution in this sense just refers to the number of pixels; there is no distance scale involved. Those pixels can map to a sensor that was a foot by a foot, or an inch by an inch, or whatever. They can also map to a picture being taken of a one centimeter by one centimeter microchip, or a light year by light year section of the sky.
That's why the picture is indeed a gigapixel. (Or so it supposedly is, I guess. I haven't actually downloaded it yet due to the slashdot effect)
Does anyone have a copy of the image? If so, a torrent would be nice.
Site seems slow, here's a mirror of the first page:
t m
http://www.mskf.org/mirrors/gigapixel/gigapixel.h
0x0D 0x0A
Might look Here as well.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
DON'T post a link to a gigapixel pic
I've become addicted to the amazing detail that is visible in large prints from these images!
....
Given that the resolving power of the human eye (under ideal conditions at the center of the retina) is about 1 arcminute (1/60th of one degree) ... Assuming one pixel per arcminute, an image with dimensions of 3780 x 2485 would suffice to capture the amount of detail that the naked eye could resolve. This image has more than 100 times this detail. Looking at the full sized digital image, one is able to see things that might have been difficult or impossible to spot, even when using binoculars.
I know the feeling. I've rigged a 2.1 MPixel camera to both a 50 mm telescope, a few simple close up lenses and a microsoope. Some of the results are here. I know want that kind of vision enhancement everywhere.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Which makes me wonder how many pixels would be necessary to reach a point where no additional sharpness could be obtained by additional pixels.
The definition in this case is completely filling my field of view (wrap around screen or retinal scanner), allowing me to move my eyes without redrawing, so every point would have to be as sharp as my full center of view (foveal) vision, but without allowing me to move my head (either changing its angle or moving closer to the image).
I can imagine many uses for an even higher resolution image that would allow you to zoom in on interesting spots, but I'm curious about how many pixels the full view scenario above would require. If we just had that, then we could refresh the screen in response to head movements (I wouldn't want to do it for eye movements) and cover pretty much everything, I would think.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
What is a non-scientific picture anyways? Terraserver has a much larger picture of most of the United States.
Sounds like Apple marketing :)
Film (given enough square inches) has a capacity that exceeds any commercially available digital sensor. for instance, our Heidelberg Tango scanner has a true scanning resolution of 10,780dpi. The photomultiplier tubes in the scanner (one each of red, geen, and blue) are looking at liquid-mounted film through optically clear mylar sheets from fractions of an inch away through a microscope lens. There's a picture of the scanner and some other info on our web site.
Combined with a scanner, gigapixels of resolution are easily available without upsampling, up-resing, or other resolution-creating tricks.
My 4X5 view camera with fine-grained slide film captures about 1.4GP usable resolution at 8bits per channel in a fraction of a second. Go to an 8X10 camera and film at that scanning resolution (5000dpi) and you quadruple the number of pixels - although Photoshop can't open the resulting file because it's too big.
Compared to digital composition, shooting on film and drum scanning is faster and cheaper if your time is valued as a professional. I don't expect that this situation will last forever, but this "gigapixel barrier" article ignores some very relevant options when there is plenty of time to make a photograph and quality is paramount.
There are products available based on fractal tecnology (Genuine Fractal PrintPro comes to mind) that claim "any resolution anytime". So in theory, you can take any digital picture any resize it without loss of resolution. However, as always, crap_in==crap_out!
Should be how to do a DoS attack on some poor guy's website.
It was more of a comment on cluster solutions in general. Yes, you can quote high performance numbers on a network of inexpensive boxes, but it's dubious in many cases whether you actually get more work done for your time and money when you factor in the work spent keeping the thing going.
paintball
God dammit! That Roku I just bought is already obsolete. Now I need a ultra-HDTV. Asshole.
OK, maybe it's a neat idea... but it was never really a barrier. The only thing that has ever stood in the way was time and effort. It's easier now that it would have been with, say, 640K pixels, and it's still not all that easy. Dozens and dozens of pictures strategically taken and spliced together, but this is not some sort of technical breakthrough.
RP
He's using software to stitch it together and some amount of work must necessarily be done to rectify differences between one shot and another, because this is the real world and all your lines of sight are not parallel. Therefore, this too is a (partially) interpolated image. This is still not a real 1Gpixel image which is not using interpolation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just for the heck of making a huge image, I once scanned a palm leaf on my flatbed. It was big, so I scanned it in two sections and stitched it.
My scanner scans at 2400 x 2400 dpi without interpolation, and it's 8.5" x 11.75", yielding two uncropped images, each at 20,400 pixels x 28,200. Cropped, my final image was about 30,000 * 28,000. OK, only
Additionally, I would like to argue with him about the potential of film to match this. I scan 35mm slides shot on films like Ektachrome 100. It's worth scanning a good sharp image on this film at 2400 ppi. The image size on 35 mm film is 24 x 36 mm, or about 1 1/3 square inches, yielding about 7.6 MegaPixels.
100 speed films are commonly available in 8 x 10 size, which should yield 460 megapixels.
But wait! We can go higher than this. Konica Impressa 50 should be much finer grained than this. There's a reason drum scanners go up to 4,000 x 4,000 ppi- to suck the resolution out of really fine-grained films. So an 8 x 10 scanned at 4,000 x 4,000 ppi can yield 1.28 GigaPixels- more than this image. And that's not even getting very exotic yet.
Polariod used to make a viewcamera that took 16" x 20" negatives. If you special order uncut sheet film from Kodax or Konica and cut your own 16 * 20 negatives, this could take you into the 5 GigaPixel range. The two issues that aren't clear here are 1. if any lenses have high-enough resolving power to deal with this, and 2. how the hell you scan it. Scanning it probably will boil down to cutting it, scanning it, and re-stitching it on the computer. Still, the image would have been captured all at once, probably in a lot less than 13 minutes depending on the maximum aperture of your lens.
In terms of affordability and portability, the digitals are really nice, and it's mostly the way I've gone. I still shoot 4 * 5 black and white negatives sometimes, and they make great 16" x 20" prints, but that's mostly for the fun of it. Digital panoramas are great. I'll not deny that digital is where the future is.
Oh, and about printing, per the question on his site. For the highest quality image per inch, hire someone with a Durst Lambda 130. It can make continuous photographic prints up to 60" x 164' (yes, that's feet) in a resolution equivalent to 4,000 x 4,000 dpi in inkjet terms, and continuous tone.
A ColorSpan Displaymaker Mach12 can get you up to 72" wide by effectively unlimited length, and it prints with a 12-color ink set. Not as high quality as the Lambda per square inch, but impressive.
And if what you really want is just plain big, HP DesignJets go up to 96" wide now. The quality's still good.
Where do you find people with these kinds of machines? Here are a couple of suggestions, but there are lots more: Harvest Productions or Design Image.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Panorama image stitching
It will take images from a digital camera, figure out which pictures belong where and automatically stitch them together.
There is no software available for it yet, it exists as a research prototype. But there is possibility for development.
I used "convert" (comes with imagemagick) to resize the unmanageably large wtc photo that was posted up (check the bittorrent link if you want the original). I resized the images to 3000px, 1000px and 500px for anyone that wants to see that image but can't deal with the original (the 3000px one took about 5-10 mins and 1GB ram). http://www.parseerror.com/wtc-photo/
kudos200 just think of a higher MP rating as the ability to be able to zoom in or blow up a picture without as much loss of detail.
If you want to get into DPI ratings and such then you would be actually talking about the size of the CMOS/CDD chip relative to the megapixel rating which is not realy all that important unless you are building micro cameras.
Personally I would like to see more large format CCD/CMOS chips or mulit CCD/CMOS arrangements come out in order to give the megapixel ratings a big boost and push things up into the 20-30MP arena.
he told you: moores law. he also says hes not sure its correct.
Gigapixel is old news, so 1980s.
Digital imaging devices are now in the
100,000 by 100,000 pixel range. We sell them,
and companies use them 24x7.
Even Zip compressed the files are >3GB.
Unfortunately, the image feature detection algorithm, called SIFT, is patented and it doesn't look like we'll be able to make use of the method. Some people are looking at ways to go past SIFT to get the same auto-stitching functionality.
[
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
Yes, they are scientific but AFAIK they are also just photos. I saw these about a year ago at a radio telescope receiver station for NASA just south of Canberra (Australia). They are about 1.5m wide and up to about 5m long with a resolution so good I couldn't see any pixels (so > 300dpi I guess). At 300dpi, that puts them at around 17716x59055 = 1,046,220,472 pixels or approximately 1 Gigapixel!
I wrote the first non-scientific program that malloc-ed ONE PETABYTE of data!
... why, I'll change it to malloc an EXABYTE!
Golly, and when someone breaks that record
W00t! Guiness record book, here I come!
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Because they'd still get 196 separate pictures each of which would have to be corrected for lens distortions, pitch, yaw, roll and other things.
If you want to have some fun open up Adobe photoshop and make yourself a blank gigapixel photo it to give you a sense of scale of what this guy has done. The one I did to get up to a gig was 112 inches tall by 140 inches long at 150 dpi. Brings new meaning to 8x10 don't you think? When I tried to save it as a JPEG (level 12 compression) the white (blank) picture came in at a whopping 23mb (His picture was around 2gb).
Software interpolated or no you have to be at least a little impressed with what he has done.
I downloaded his picture and stitched it to 4 other copies... Now we have a 5 GP picture. Beat that!
"Wow look at my brand new gigapixel camera!"
"How many picture can you get on your $600 4gb compact flash card?"
"Hmmm on the lowest setting?"
"Yeah"
"Two"
Couldn't you just use some fractal program to generate infinite detail in a "gigapixel" fractal picture? You could easily beat this guy just by sacrificing a bit of rendering time.
tubgirl is quite bad. goatse is also very bad. but what is worse? only this image:
http://poetry.rotten.com/blonde/0005/
Um... Fyi, 6.6 x 18 months != 9.9 months.
I have followed this guys work for a couple of years. He is well ahead of the pack.
.. and he rewrote some of the software as well.
He started out with a Nikon 9xx series camera and produced quite a few stunning photographs with it even by todays standards. He built his own pano head out of a couple dollars worth of hardware parts and calibrated the lens to find distortion numbers to be plugged into his stitching software. Oh
His photos are not so much panoramas (although he does those too) as ultra wide angles. Stuff that is difficult if not impossible to produce using otherwise normal equipment and processes. Clearly he has taken stitching to a new level. While he is not alone in this endevour he is one of the few and is currently producing the best work in my opinion.
From the Nikon 9xx he moved up to a Minolta 7i and from there further refined the process and produced his greatest body of work until now. There is one photo that is a nine panel stitch with people moving through the frames and you cannot find a stitch artifact. Amazing.
Then he switched to a Nikon prosumer rig and his first few examples were rather dissappointing in comparision to his best Minolta efforts which I think underscores the close relationship this photographer has with his equipment and his processes more than the raw superiority of that equipment. Indeed, the early Nikon work continues to stand up well especially when one considers what it was he was working with.
I haven't checked in with his website in a few months so I haven't seen his latest results (currently slashdotted) although I would expect to find mastery of his latest Nikon setup with all the results one would expect from that. The end product should be his best work to date but I would encourage everyone to weave through his earlier work as well for it contains tremendous insight into a process that often yields breathtaking results even when reduced to display monitor sizes.
In the end we are reminded that the camera is a tool, the outcome very much dependant on the person using it. Max Lyons shows us what can be accomplished with modest equipment and ingenuity in stretching the boundaries of technology and art.
A perfect 196 picture stitch using consumer grade hardware and software? That's not over the top, that's over the moon. Hats off to Max Lyons.
Save the link for a visit after the slashdotting. You will be glad you did.
It says right in the blurb i.e. non-scientific
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
You're almost not worth the you fail it.
I still get a chuckle out of the fact that digi manufactures still seem to think that digital zoom is worth half a poop to anyone other than the complete photo noob.
Note for all you photo noobi, digital zoom is done with software and can usually be done quicker and much better on your PC. Also stay away from cameras with less than a 3x OPTICAL zoom.
I've been drooling over Canon's latest, (Digital Rebel) since I can't afford the pro SLRs, just for the chance to have some much nicer lenses.
Right now I'm happy with my Minolta Dimage 7i, though I wish I had picked up the 7hi as it has interal RAM that allows for faster multiple shots. It has a descent lense and a high enough MP rating to make the size prints I want.
It's even sillier when you consider that an sbeast702 qualified "true picture" is captured by assembling information from disjointed and unrelated pixels on a CCD. I guess it's OK if it happens at the pixel level rather than sub-picture fragments.
Or at least it was the first 20 million times I read it in places where it wasn't completely off-topic. +1,000 INSIGHTFUL!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, but mounted in an array they'd be static relative to each other. Work out the distortions etc once, and automate the corrections and stitching.
...are used for image based rendering in the visual effects world. They're not gigapixel in size but pretty close.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
As a fledgeling photographer with a 6 megapixel slr of my own, I have to wonder...who would want a gigapixel camera? That Kind of resolution isn't too practical for anything other than being WOW'ed by enormous fine-art prints. I think the main issue, of course, is hard drive space. How many warehouses of RAID arrays would you need to contain your photo collection? "There are fields, Neo. Vast, endless fields... where photos are not taken...they are STORED"
That's an horrible picture
he answers it.
Is this him?
x=10185 through 10323 (crop from the original)
is a windows machine, the TIFF is about 2GB so if he used windows after he finished the composite and click "save" he probably got an error that there is not enough space on disk or the disk is write protected
Really, this could work.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
35mm film is routinely scanned to 4000dpi, resulting in an approximatively 20MB file. Now if you scan at the same resolution a piece of 8x10 film, which has 50x the surface area of 35mm, you get 1G.
To give you a better example would be a composite 360 panoramic I made last summer.
The thumb for it that I put on my website is 918x150 pixels and is a .14MP image.
The one I had for download is 6611x1080 and is a 7.14MP image.
The original fresh off of Photoshop is 13258x2166 is a 28.72 MP image.
For those of you interested I made it with a nice program called Panoramic Factory. (http://www.panoramafactory.com) Very easy to use and works quite well, that for under $50. The only downside with panoramics is trying to print them. The ones I have made have been about 6:1 length to height, so unless you have access to a printer that accepts rolled paper or very wide stock you will not be able to print them to any satisfactory size for viewing. On 8x10 sheets of paper the image will only be an inch or two tall and as long as the sheet of paper.
I lived in Cambodia for a year and I remember reading a story about the largest ever film-based photograph created. I googled and found the story here.
The printed photograph itself (according to this link) is 1.25 meters tall and 62 meters wide. I wonder how this would compare (in resolution and otherwise) to the gigapixel image mentioned. It's an interesting story to read in any case.
Steve Mann and others developed a system called gunroll that can align and stitch video frames. When frames overlap, it ups the resolution. Makes me think a basic pan and scan of Bryce canyon taking only, say, one minute would produce an even larger image than this one, without manual blends.
see : their paper and see this image which adds resolution as they have discovered : scroll down to the swimming pool
If anyone knows more about Steve Mann's work or got his software to work for the Rest Of Us (tm) please post a reply here! (Steve's C software can be got off the web, google for it.)
Adam.
Arenchagunnarooda? Nahdinwanna.
The CCD wouldn't be the problem.. you're going to run into trouble finding lenses that can resolve such resolutions to an extent where you can say that the data is still good.
:)
Of course you can use larger lenses on larger CCDs, but then your camera needs to be trucked around in the back of a humvee with crane mount
It's has enormous detail. I stitched it together from 400 5 MP images of the inside of my closet (with door closed, of course.) The hardest part was keeping the images straight. You try to put together two photos that are completely black and you'll know what I mean.
and fuck all you whinnie little "it's been done before" nerds. The guy did it HIMSELF with a consumer grade digital camera, this is not the same as using a freaking professional large format film camera, or having a government backed research ORGANISATION do it. Credit where it's due.
This is EXACTLY the plot of one of the best movies ever made about photography -- or anything else -- Michaelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up."
A fashion photographer shooting a model in a park goes home to blow up the pictures, and discovers clues in the background he thinks might reveal a murder taking place. There's this great scene where he's frantically enlarging, and enlarging, and enlarging the picture (on an enlarger, in a darkroom)... and then you see the payoff, this tiny thing far in the distance that the naked eye could not have seen, a hand holding a pistol.
He returns to the park to find a body, which has disappeared the next time he returns.
Then Vanessa Redgrave drops by to try and finagle the negatives away from him.
"Blow Up" also features a great soundtrack with a score by Herbie Hancock, and a memorable scene of Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck (IIRC) smashing his guitar and throwing the pieces to the audience. The protagonist/photog gets away with the neck, and after a lengthy chase on foot, slows to a walk, examines the neck, and drops it in a trashcan.
One of the great all-time movies ever made, IMHO, a commentary about how we look at things, how easily we believe what we see. The whole thing dissolves into added layers of Pynchonesque mystery, rather than resolving in True Detective closure.
Also, a lot of fun 60's shenanigans. here's a pretty decent, if too negative, review.
He needs a robotic tripod to position the camera for him, so that there's less time in hand-stitching.
In fact, he could probably hook the camera to a computer directly, and with sufficiently advanced image analysis, have the computer position the camera closely enough to avoid hand-editing at all.
Creating a picture of this size by spending many hours of labor is cool to prove it can be done. Having automated tools to churn one of these out in a couple of minutes would be VERY cool.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Holographic film has grains that are literally the size of a wavelength of light or smaller to record interference patterns. It's equivalent to 3000+ lines of resolution per millimeter horizontally and vertically, which is 9 "megapixels" per square millimeter. A square centimeter of holographic film has .9 gigapixels on it.
I know that most holograms are used in science, but there are people who take pictures of normal objects which are not scientific, so I think this counts.
Linking together smaller lower resolution pictures, to create a gigapixel image?
There are fabric printing services which seam together pictures to cover the entire surface of buildings. Samsung did one that was 18 stories tall in 1998.
It was created from hundreds of smaller files.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
not even close to the first gigapixel image. Metis Group metis-group.com has a Digital Macro Camera with a 1.5 Gigapixel CCD. Not a collection of images stitched together, one single image. And it is used for more than "scientific". Well, how's fine art photography?
In God we trust,
everyone else we firewall!!
Is there anyone out there who actually believes this is the first gigapixel image?
Hey everyone!!! I've created the worlds first terrabyte
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
If this picture estimates to 100 GB in one 2D jpeg file, I don't want to imagine 3D porn.
I would have to sell my car to afford enough hard disk space. Ouch.
the military did this as early as the 80's and NASA had done this in a project of their own
I skimmed throught that article too fast !
A large format camera uses 8"x10" film. That's big, much bigger than 35 mm film.
8"x10" is 203.2mm x 254mm, or 51612.8 square mm.
High quality slide film like velvia can do 100 lines per mm with a decent lens & tripod, which gives 500,000,000 pixels (half a gigapixel) without trying hard.
You have to increase the lines per mm to 140 to get a gigapixel in one image. That's very difficult, but not impossible.
Of course, one large format slide is easier to handle than 196 stiched together images:
- you get the same image, no worries about the subject moving
- you don't have to precisely move the camera after every one of 196 exposures
- you can see what image you're taking before you take it
- you can tilt/shift the lens & film for perspective correction
Digital will eventually beat film for image quality, but it's not there yet. However, most people are content with the image quality of a decent ($1,000) digital camera because of all the digital conveniences.
The free-as-in-beer panotools libraries itself is closed-source, and not supported anymore. IPIX(tm) apparently was one of several companies chasing Helmut for patent issues, the resolution of which I am not sure. New work is being done today to open the process up with Open Source equivalents. Otherwise, it's the top tool since it can stitch images taken from any orientation into several projections into several image formats with high quality.
Actually the library's open-source, but Helmut isn't supporting it anymore. He's taken it off his site but you can get it from mirrors like this or this.
At least one of the accompanying tools was never released in source by Helmut (namely the Java tool, ptpicker, for setting control points).
As for Ipix, yes they are still holding their patents up as a threat. But Pictosphere is claiming prior art; read about it here.
This will be an interesting one to watch as Ipix sues Ford Oxaal by claiming they own the techniques *they* are now licensing from *him* (and you thought SCO was interesting). I don't know if Oxaal's motives are altruistic (I doubt it) but Oxaal himself is distributing Dersch's ptviewer under the GPL (although I think he might be violating the GPL by not providing source on his web site).
Finally someone not at Virginia Tech who can justify buying a maxed out Dual 2 Ghz PowerMac G5; patiently waiting for the new 300" Cinema Display from Apple.
I just pasted 4 of them together to make a 4 Gigapixel image.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Clearly Max has overlooked drum scanners in making his "first" claim. It's quite feasible to get images of this resolution or greater from a medium or (more likely) large format transparency or negative.
Thousands of such images will have been digitised in this way, since the 1980s when drum scanners were linked to digital front-ends. (One would hardly label these "scientific" - such uses are more likely to belong under advertising or publishing headings.)
On a related note - until the recent release of Adobe Photoshop CS, earlier versions of the program were limited to working with images no larger than 30,000x30,000 (900,000,000) pixels.
you had me at #!
I guess that's about typical for the dot-bomb economy :-)
Infuriate left and right
Been done before.
I heard about this image a couple of months ago from some camera nut I know. I never saw it or knew that is was on a website, so is this a new picture or has the date in the top just been updated?
Or should I say Gibipixels
I would recommend anyone to view these type of images on a tile display. At SC 2003, at least EVL and SGI did show dome impressive demo's (in particular, SGI did show some interesting geographic imagery software).
Yeah, where is it?
There are other scanbacks for MF cameras that also have very high resolutions. Naturally they can be used only on relatively static targets.
I was at the Exploratorium last month when I visited the Bay Area, and one of their exhibits is a photograph of a San Francisco panorama which was taken on extremely large-format film but was claimed to be equivalent to a multi-gigapixel image. Unfortunately, it was near the end of the day when I saw this exhibit and I don't know the details as well as I should, and I can't find anything about it on the exploratorium website, www.exploratorium.edu
Hate stupid software on freshmeat? Laugh at
http://www.kigamo.com/scanback/dmc.html
Camera back for the 4x5 large format camera has been beyond 1GP for quite some time. Look ma, no stitching!
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
"Cool how many pictures can you get on your 4 GoogolByte(1x10e100) Flash card that it came with?"
"On the highest setting?"
"Yeah sure"
"Only 15,000."
"Man companies are so cheap what they include with the camera these days!"
"You said it"
Also, minute changes in the camera array (say, thermal deformation of the structure they're mounted on) would cause pixel level errors which are painfully obvious when doing pixel-level inspection. It's easier to just tell undergrads to stitch the damn thing by hand. :-)
buy a few poster prints
So, just out of curiousity, how small can a 1 Gpxl image be put onto paper?
Thinking idly, 10^(9/2) along an edge would be pretty big on a laser printer capable of 300,600,1200 dpi...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Calling this a 1 gigapixel image is akin to calling 100 stacked 20 inch monitors a 2000inch x 2000 inch monitor.
witold.org
You can get a 4.1 Giga pixel camera.
probably cost $25k+
No idea why you would want to...
Easy. Don't do it from your home zone. Write a nice AppleScript that does the print jobs and install it on some machine which will be running at night. Script should be self-deleting, of course, and don't bother to trash it, delete it securely.
Voila. Call me Gutenberg.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?