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Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier

Posted by michael on from the sweetness dept.

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.'"

27 of 538 comments (clear)

  1. My god... by MrEd · · Score: 5, Funny
    Linking a 1 GIGAPIXEL photo to Slashdot? bwwwwwaahahahahahahahahah!


    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...

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    Wah!

    1. Re:My god... by Oen_Seneg · · Score: 5, Funny

      Goatse in Gigapixel is something I really don't want to see. Normal Goatse is bad enough.

    2. Re:My god... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Wow! by krbvroc1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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. ;)

  3. new low by 3ryon · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  4. Next stage ... by jonbryce · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is to print each one of them on a separate sheet of paper, and tape them together?

    1. Re:Next stage ... by retinaburn · · Score: 5, Funny
      I am printing it out on my dot-matrix printer.

      somewhere the photographer screams in pain

    2. Re:Next stage ... by addaon · · Score: 5, Funny

      somewhere the pointillists giggle to themselves.

      --

      I've had this sig for three days.
    3. Re:Next stage ... by cryptor3 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Then after that, we need to convert it to ASCII art. That'll be a doozy.

  5. Finally, the long, sad wait is over: by burgburgburg · · Score: 5, Funny

    The nation can rest, confident that we were the first to break the dreaded Gigapixel barrier. God speed, Max Lyon.

  6. Why by ad0gg · · Score: 5, Funny
    Why couldn't have been porn?!?!?!

    sigh

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    Have you ever been to a turkish prison?

    1. Re:Why by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I guess you have slept with my wife yet

    2. Re:Why by IvyMike · · Score: 5, Funny

      Because at that resolution, you would see her mitochondria.

    3. Re:Why by MR.Gates · · Score: 5, Funny

      Mayby not, but the rest of the neighborhood has. ;-P

      --

      A few hours grace before the madness begins again.
  7. Relatively static? by SpaceRook · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Relatively static? by bobbozzo · · Score: 5, Informative
      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?

      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.

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  8. ouch.. by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    A gigapixel "Where's Waldo" would drive thousands insane.

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    Trolling is a art,
    1. Re:ouch.. by morcheeba · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
  9. Pff easy by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  10. another large image by Harald+Paulsen · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It's worth to mention the WTC ground zero photo. It doesn't look to be stitched together, and it's a whopping 9372x9372, or 87 megapixels.

    (using freecache to not toast my own webserver)

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    Harald
    1. Re:another large image by PurpleFloyd · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
  11. but we cannot rest! by cheezus · · Score: 5, Funny

    The Commies are pumping billions into Terrapixel research. There can not be a terrapixel gap!

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    /bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
  12. Hehe by planetoid · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ansel Adams just got friggin' OWNED!

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  13. Huge bandwidth bills aren't funny... by Speare · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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    [ .sig file not found ]
  14. Re:Yar by Speare · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    • Use a tripod and a pano head to rotate the camera around the nodal point.
    • Take 196 images that overlap slightly in grid formation.
    • Use a GUI to assign several control points for each pair of images: image[N]@x1,y1 == image[M]@x2,y2 (He uses his own GUI called PTAssembler for Windows. Others exist, and Hugin works on Linux and Windows.)
    • Use an engine to optimize the distortions, and to render the distorted images onto a final image. (He uses Helmut Dersch's panotools, as does PTGui and Hugin and other front-ends.)
    • He had additional challenges due to 2GB address limits in Windows (and most 32bit Linux builds would have similar challenges).
    • He had additional challenges due to apps breaking with images bigger than 16bit signed coordinate space (and a few Linux tools break on this too).

      • 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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  15. How many pixels are enough? by GCP · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."
  16. Re:How do you print it? by xpccx · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I downloaded an archival quality (200Meg) image of a map from the Library of Congress that I wanted printed. Since the Library of Congress charges $200-$300 to print the maps I called the local Kinko's, or maybe it was Sir Speedy. Anyway, I asked them how large of a print they could do and the guy told me the largest he had done was something like 20+ ft by 20+ ft. They printed the map on thick, almost vinyl, paper and it came out to something like 4ft by 3ft. Not only did it look amazing, but it cost me less than $50.

    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.