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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.'"
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 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. ;)
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.
sigh
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
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?
A gigapixel "Where's Waldo" would drive thousands insane.
Trolling is a art,
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
(using freecache to not toast my own webserver)
Harald
I don't think even a Carl Zeiss lens can actually resolve a billion pixels, but it's worth a shot. Isn't it?
At least it would, if Seagate/Maxtor/WD/Samsung could get their way.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
... and can't download such a huge picture. Could someone condense it down a bit and send me a copy?
Infuriate left and right
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/
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
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
The Commies are pumping billions into Terrapixel research. There can not be a terrapixel gap!
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Ansel Adams just got friggin' OWNED!
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
These guyscan help ya:
They got a 10' foot thermal for only $275,000. I'd snap it up.
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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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.
Well, if you wait a few days for the site to calm down, you can READ his site to get a LOT of information about his processes.
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.
I use (and help develop) the Hugin tool for my front-end; I've done a few 25 MP images, but nothing so large or as diverse as Max Lyons' works.
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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."
I'd bet any decent frame shop could frame a very large image. I'd guess they'd charge you several hundred dollars for the custom frame though.
"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"