Largest Digital Photograph in the World

thrill12 writes "Dutch research institute TNO has unveiled what it believes is the largest digital photograph in the world. The image contains 2.5 gigapixels or 7.5 gigabyte worth of data. It is composed of 600 single images shot by a computer-controlled pan-tilt unit in 7 second intervals. Afterwards, all photos where stiched together (compare: panorama tools) using the capacity of 5 high-end pc's in about 24 hours time."

Comments

Disappointment.

[slcdb]

I guess this guy is going to be somewhat disappointed when he hears about this.

What a waste

[PurdueGraphicsMan]

If I were going to invest the time and money into creating the world's largest photo, I believe I'd choose something a little more interesting than the boring skyline they chose. Why not do some planning and create a beautiful landscape photo or something that people would actually want to see.

Eitherway, I can just see the MASSIVE, high resolution billboards now...

Legit?

[Piranhaa]

I don't know if its just me, but (600 pics * 7 second intervals) = (4200 / 60) = 70 minutes. Wouldn't the sun have changed position or changed its intensity in that ammount of time? I know within an hour where I live, the sun will have gone between clouds, start going down -- changing the intensity of where it is shining. I remember another article posted like this a while back, but it all seems kind of iffy to me....

Re:Legit?

[Sandor at the Zoo]

Wouldn't the sun have changed position or changed its intensity in that ammount of time?

Yes. If you look carefully, you can find stitching seams, with clear lighting differences to either side.

In the upper-right hand corner of the image, there are three beige buildings. Zoom way in to actually see them as buildings. :-) The one in the middle has a very clear seam near the left side of the building.

Nikon made a bigger print from a 3 Megapixel Cam

[micksterama]

I saw a huge billboard in Times Square Nikon made from a 3 Megapixel Coolpix camera. It was a shot of a dinosaur on a set, for Universal's Jurassic Park DVD launch back in 2000. This thing was like 45 x 65. Sounds like this image is much higher resolution, but if you're going to print it, you wouldn't see much of a difference at equal distances... Seems like a waste of a lot of pixel power just to make a point...

file size limitation?!?

[theMerovingian]

I work in remote sensing and GIS, and we make alot of seamless aerial photos (for multiple entire states).

Unless I just totally missed the boat, Windows and Linux have a file size limitation of around 2 gigabytes. Therefore, my suspicion is that the images are stored in separate tiles that when viewed all at once make a large mosaic.

If anyone knows of another way to store this much data all in one file, please enlighten me! The closest I've been able to come is storing all the image data in ArcSDE, a GIS product that allows you to store geospatial data inside an enterprise database.

Cheating

[zaktheduck]

2.5 gigapixel pictures? We're still a long way off from having digital cameras that can pull this sort of thing off in one shot, rather than stitching one together from composites.

My house

[McWilde]

I got there before the slashdotting. I can almost see my house in the picture. I live about 12 km away from where the picture was taken from (by bike, so probably about 10 km as the photon flies). Actually my house is tucked away behind some taller building, but you can easily count the windows on the new Ministry of Education that is just a bit farther down the road.

Bah...

[flimflam]

I'm much more impressed by this.

First stitching, then tiling

[wwwillem]

In a way, this is funny. The best way to handle huge images is by tiling them. I like to play around with maps and satellite images (see here with and without grid) and have learned the lesson that to put that type of large images on a web server, you better cut it into tiles.

Flash based zoom/pan/tilt viewers do the same thing. A bit more advanced, but you download only the part that is currently in view. Even when you open a PDF in your browser, just the page in view is downloaded. And think about those huge video walls.

So, the funny part is now that you take many, many pictures, then use a lot of processing to stitch the results together, and then cut it into tiles again to display the resulting image. Wouldn't it make more sense to put some more effort in that robotic camera control device and make that so accurate that it can take the pictures, still touching, but with zero overlap? That would be cool!! I suspect that making the high precision optics for such a camera would be really, really expensive. Which is probably why TNO did it the way they did.

Hrm

[Auckerman]

This really is stretching the definition of a photograph. It would be trivial (in the sense the process is already know) to top this by using a camcorder(s) to capture the data, moving the images to 3-d space then projecting the image to 2-D. It would take a bit of CPU time, but it would be just as much of a photo as this is.

11.3 Gpixel in my research lab

[VDM]

I know it's risky (risk of slashdotting, of course...), however among the things I do for research there are also the so-called "digital slides", which are digital copies of pathology glass slides. We acquire them with a motorised microscope, at 40x magnification, which means about 0.3 micron/pixel. The maximum area acquired was about 21x45 mm, for a total of 28340 images, each one is 699x572 pixel (analog camera). This corresponds to about 11.3 Gpixels. Usually we remain well under this value, but anyway around 1-2 Gpixel on average.
Please be very kind with our test server: http://www.telemed.uniud.it/eslides/.
(anyway, I never thought this kind of things could become a news item).

not impressed.

[sxtxixtxcxh]

i made the largest baby photo using 2500 digital photos each one at least 4.0megapixels in size and some as large as 6 megapixels.

exposure started june 2002 and ended early november 2003.

i used MacOSaiX to put it together on a two year old powerbook, and it took about 12 hours.

it's not seemless, but the mosaic effect is cool.

Re:not impressed.

[Speare]

Pardon me for bursting your bubble, but...

If you can point a piece of software you downloaded or bought at a directory full of snapshots, and get a mosaic of another snapshot, how is that particularly interesting? You don't even say what the actual image resolution is in your final, and your image has duplicates because your library wasn't big enough.

Max Lyons created new tools to develop image files that large. He selected a subject which benefitted from his technique. He hand-shot the images with the final project in mind. He found a printer who would show his print at a large scale, not just a 20"x30" you can upload to ezprints.com.

The Gigapixl film folks are using a camera to its fullest potential, carefully choosing subjects which, again, benefit from the capability.

BFD

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Is the "so what" factor lost on anybody? If I stand in one spot and move slightly, snapping a shot each time I twitch, I bet I can photoshop it all together an top this. But really, who cares? It's NOT one picture taken with some fabulous technology; it's just a some art piece.

How about the inverse?

[fwitness]

I've been looking for some kind of OSS that let's me take a picture and print it on multiple pieces of paper. Many digital cameras can take absolutely huge pictures these days, and I'd like to be able to make my own panorama style prints. I've been looking for months for such an animal but no luck.

Anyone here have suggestions?