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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.'"
The resulting stitched image is a 1 gigapixel image.
You'll be waiting 20 years before you see a 1 gigapixel camera.
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.
Uh, dude. I can't afford a satellite. Or commercial stitching software.
Regular, off-the-shelf camera and lense (which itself is gonna have distortion). Free (as in beer at least) stitching software (i.e.: not a "product").
This is *not* "nothing", IMHO.
The camera he used is comparable to the $1000 Digital Rebel with a slight telephoto.
Mark
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.
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What amount of ram? Like the amount you'd need to add together 196 numbers?
Aligning the images will probably happen in pairs... Once you have all the offsets computed between each image and it's anchor image (say anchor is to the left, and for the leftmost column it's to the top), then you can just fly through all the images reading a row (or two) at a time and spitting out the result.
You'll have to load all the images to do the alignment, and it may work better if you used a wider alignment (image plus all 8 around it), but still that's only 9 images loaded at once, followed by the next 9 images.
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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.
We had a 150 megapixel image (greyscale, in 1999 or so) that had been taken by an F15 equiped with a survailiance pod. The plane flew many passes over this little section of town and the images had been stitched together. I printed it out at 11x17 (my inkjet couldn't physically capture all the detail even at that level - it was more like 1 bit per pixel) and we'd play "I spy"
There must have been 100 homes or more in there... you could see all the trees and cars pretty clearly. One car had a sunshade in the front, another had its door open. Some vehicles were trucks, and one had some old tires in the back. One guy's house was really messy, and there was an area where they parked construction equipment.
The most interesting part of the picture was the pool at the apartment complex.. there were lots of empty chairs, but someone in a bikini was lying in one face-up, unaware that the F15 flying way overhead was taking her picture.
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Site seems slow, here's a mirror of the first page:
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http://www.mskf.org/mirrors/gigapixel/gigapixel.h
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What is a non-scientific picture anyways? Terraserver has a much larger picture of most of the United States.
That would not be "photographic."
/dev/random > x.tiff and call it a picture... but you're missing the whole point. It's the low-tech equivalent of a 1 Gigapixel camera, and that's what makes it cool.
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