Slashdot Mirror
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."
I guess this guy is going to be somewhat disappointed when he hears about this.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
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....
I'm much more impressed by this.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
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.
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
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).
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.
for a minute there, i lost myself...