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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 wanna DL this, and 7.5 GIGS is DEFINTELY gonna /. a server.
Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
So now I suppose this is a new silly field that people will compete in. Every 6 months we'll have to hear about the latest largest digital image in the world. Maybe slashdot should make an icon... or maybe would should just ignore it.
They proudly introduce The World's Biggest Printer (and toner catridge)
all those pixels and not one nipple! What a waste...
How big would the thumbnail of this image be?
I blinked! Aw, man.
....and it involves needing a lot more storage for pr0n.
I hope the land around you yields, a crop like all the other fields, and then your waiting might make sense...
About a week ago, an "Ask Slashdot" featured a question on high performance web serving. Now we know why.
(not a very fast, but currently still working) mirror here: http://spider007.net/ext/tweakers.net/niews_35069. html
You found Waldo?
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.
Eitherway, I can just see the MASSIVE, high resolution billboards now...
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
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....
Seriously what is the point in monster photograph that only a handful of people will ever see in its 7.5 GB fullness. This is nothing more than a crappy PR stunt and Slashot is rapidly turning into advertising central.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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...
I'll save you guys the suspense: It's a closeup of Tara Reid's boob.
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.
Maybe
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!
I'd like to take this time to point out the lunacy of the 'megapixel' ratings for cameras
A number determined from the multiplication of length and width in pixels of an image has about as much to do with the quality of a picture as the size of your passenger cabin has to do with the speed of your car. Yes, you can print larger pictures without seeing pixels if you have a higher megapixel count, but chances are it's not the resolution of your photos that you'll notice.
A major factor in the quality of any image is the quality of the optics used to take it. That means the lens, the glass used to focus and point the image onto the sensor. Quality glass, such as low dispersion glass (I'm preferential to Canon's "L" glass) will create images with sharp edges, crisp focus, and good bokeh. Use cheap glass and you'll get the opposite. Effects like soft focus, purple halos, light leaking, and distortion will all still be present if you use poor optics, no matter what the MP rating. I wonder how many people have upgraded from a 3 mp to a 4, 6, or 8 mp camera and still found lackluster results.
My point, a camera has many more features that determine quality than just the megapixel rating, when you choose one, consider these as well and you'll be happier. And here's a plug, dpreview.com does some awesome camera reviews (I'm in no way affiliated with them).
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
"
...I'll look out of the window. Sure takes less time than downloading the image!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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...
On NTFS, ReiserFS and Ext3 (Windows 2k, and Linux 2.6), I've been able to store complete DVD-9 images (8GB or so).
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
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.
Burn Hollywood Burn
It's true that the file size of our imagery is smaller than theirs, as we use Mr. Sid format for better compression, but our pixel count leaves them in the dust.
I don't believe this image is in any way extraordinary or special - pretty much every local government across the country maintains digital imagery of their jurisdiction that is comparible in resolution.
Unless I just totally missed the boat, Windows and Linux have a file size limitation of around 2 gigabytes.
Wha?
You missed the boat. Various FAT filesystems may be limited to 2GB, but Linux and modern Windows have no such built in limits. Check on the individual filesystems. I know NTFS can go over 4GB; I think it's capable up to a few TB. ext2 may have some lesser limits but is well over 4GB. XFS, JFS and ReiserFS are worth a look.
Let's rewrite that intro shall we?
Most Boring Picture Ever Taken
Dutch research institute TNO has unveiled what it believes is the most boring picture ever taken. The image contains 2.5 gigapixels or 7.5 gigabyte worth of pictures of the roof of some office park. It is composed of 600 single images shot by a computer-controlled pan-tilt unit that was incapable of actually viewing anything of any interest to anyone. Afterwards, all photos where stiched together using the capacity of 5 high-end pc's in about 24 hours time. Three graduate students died of boredom; services will be held somewhere exciting, like a morgue. Never have so many, downloaded so much, for so little...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
It's not a file size limitation that's causing the choke, it's the memory size limitation. 32-bit OSes can only handle 4 GB of RAM, so when you try to open an image that approaches that limit - blammo.
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).
Funny, I managed to store a 5 gig file on my old EXT2-based server just the other day. Really weird thing is I managed to retrieve it just fine as well! *gasp*
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Okay, is it just me or was anyone else totally expecting to see a 2.5 gigapixel image of goat.se?
/. was becoming predictable they go and pull a fast one...
Just when I though
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
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...
Well, if the Pythagorians are right I'm looking out my window at the largest digital picture in the universe right now. I laugh at your 10 gigs as I contemplate an image that requires all of the fundamental particles to store, and that's before we even get into the issues of storage media geometry.
Scrolling seems to be a bit of an issue though.
KFG
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.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Bokeh comes from the number of aperture leaves and their shape(there are some non-straight-edged aperture leaves). It has -absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the glass-.
Furthermore, Canon's $60 50mm/1.8 is plasticky, cheap, blah blah- but it's just as sharp as the faster, metal (heavier) L-series lens, and it doesn't suffer from the mild barrel distortion the L-series lens does. It has fewer aperture blades, so bokeh is not as great- which is pretty much the only reason pros buy the L version. Consumers buy it because they want a red ring around their lens and they don't want to be caught dead with a plastic lens.
You can stare at lens charts until the cows come home and argue about image quality. The L-lenses are slightly better in most image quality categories since they do generally use the very best of Canon's technology, but their chief advantage is that they are built with stronger but heavier materials, aimed at professional users who don't mind that the body is thick metal. Phil Greenspun claims he's dropped his 70-210/2.8 IS on the floor and it worked fine. I'm not about to try with mine, but I can tell you that the thing is built like a goddamn tank, and designed to be modular for easy servicing. Even the tripod mount screw is replaceable...
Please help metamoderate.
Actually, it's a limitation of the image program the person is using. Win2K and it's offspring (XP) can make use of lots of address space (read: >4GB). But, it's neither easy nor automatic. The OS will 'automatically' let each process have up to 4GB of address space (well, 2GB by default and 3GB with the right switches so the OS can have the other 1GB for its uses) (and you cannot allocate one contiguous 3GB block due to some, um, old issues), but using AWE (Address Windowing Extensions), you can basically augment your program with a paging mechanism which will give you 64-bit addressing. (But you need to page in and out of thar 64-bit space into your process' 32-bit space.) Oh, and if you want to access more RAM than 4GB from a single process, you'd need to use PAE (if your system supports it).
0 8.aspx) if you really care about any of this.
Read Raymond Chen's August 2004 blog entries (http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
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?
-- I have fans? Wow.
Here's a link to a montage of a Dolphin Brain that was assembled with a 10x objective on a microscope.
Dolphin Brain on Neuroinformatica.com
Once you get to the page, zoom in about ten times using the + magnifying glass icon.
The file is 135,000 pixels wide by 200,000 pixels high which would take 77.25 Gigabytes to store uncompressed. The compressed size on the server is 3.912 Gigabytes.
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