Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
The 1gig image isn't there. It's a much smaller, more web friendly preview. The 1gig image is a 2GB TIFF file.
We should at least buy a few poster prints from the guy considering what we are about to do to his server.
Ok, you were joking, but there is a serious answer.
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
That was almost funny.
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
yeah. He says on the website that you'll have to save it as a file, and open it through something else. MSPaint (please, no flaming) worked fine for me except for the right-most part of the image.
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 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
The sun moves (about) 180degrees/12hours = 15degrees/hour or about 3 degrees in 12 minutes.
If taken when the angle of the shadows is relatively low (like high noon), I doubt it would be noticeable.
However, it looks like it was taken near sunset or sunrise, in which case the change in length of the shadows would be much more dramatic.
The math is explained here but you'd need to know the height of the canyons plus the angle of the sun or the length of the shadows to get an exact result.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
Ah. Right. The image must have errors because Mozilla said so. Mozilla couldn't possibly have any bugs :P
Try IE. It works.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
Well, the diffraction-limited resolving power of an f/2 lens is roughly 850 lines/mm, so assuming you had a perfectly well-made lens, that should be able to resolve:
850 lines/mm * 25.4 mm/inch * 8 inch = 172.7k
850 lines/mm * 25.4 mm/inch * 10 inch = 215.9k
That means 37 Gigapixels!
If we're willing to cut Carl some slack and assume he can only get say 150 lines/mm out of his lens (*much* more realistic), that still gives you 1.2 gigapixels
so yeah no problem!
No, it's not stiched, but it's not digital either. That looks like a scanned medium-format (negative size about 6x6 cm) film image. Needless to say, medium-format film can provide lots of resolution - you could probably blow up a good medium-format photo onto a wall and get great detail. The theroretical maximum of medium-format is roughly the same as the image in the article, full size - roughly 1 billion pixels of data (zoom in any farther, and you're looking at film grain, not the recorded image). The interesting thing about the linked article is showing how it's possible to take pictures with incredible resolution, without breaking the bank on a medium-format camera, good lenses, and your own darkroom. All it takes is a good digicam and a willingness to spend hours and hours in PanoramaTools and Photoshop, getting things just right.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
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).
You mean something like this??
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
It does seem slow, so here's a mirror of all the stuff I was able to get:
t m
http://www.mskf.org/mirrors/gigapixel/gigapixel.h
0x0D 0x0A
Just browse at -1 until you see the ascii goatse. That'll give you an idea of the horror without having to see the actual pink bits.
FWIW, goatse is only the fourth or fifth worst image I've ever seen.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
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.
A guy stretching his asshole really, really wide.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Funny enough, we had a printer hooked up to the directly to the Internet. The printer (an HP with an earlier JetDirect card) had this "FTP Printing" feature. Basically, you could upload a text file via FTP and it would print (I guess this might be useful for mainframes or something, I don't know). There was no way to turn off this feature on this particular model.
What would happen is that sometimes it would start churning out pages and pages of junk. Some warez group script kiddies scan for publically-writable FTP servers and upload their stuff (movies, software, etc), later pointing people to download it. Maybe their scanning was automated or maybe they were completely clueless - I don't know.
There are other scanbacks for MF cameras that also have very high resolutions. Naturally they can be used only on relatively static targets.
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!