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Robotic Camera Extension Takes Gigapixel Photos
schliz writes "Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a device that lets a standard digital camera take pictures with a resolution of 1-gigapixel (1,000-megapixels). The Gigapan is a robotic arm that takes multiple pictures of the same scene and blends them into a single image. The resulting picture can be expanded to show incredible detail."
Seth Teller at MIT EE was doing this 8 years ago. Check out his Cityproject.
Also check out Anti-Lameness Engine, http://auricle.dyndns.org/ALE/ which does exactly the same thing, but you have to provide your own arm.
c++;
Is there any superresolution software good enough that I could, for example, take twenty blurry pics with my phone and merge them to a single sharp one?
After all, they do it all the time on CSI.
So, basically it can do the exact same thing as Photoshop, except with the added expense and complications of a robotic arm. Way to go, Carnegie Mellon.
Here
Where's the other 24 megapixels?
caveat: yes, i know. don't start. it was a joke. don't link to wikipedia to explain, besides; xkcd explained it better.
You need to load the AgentDeckard module into your BladeRunnerCam.
To some sample pictures?
This is a pretty cool project, and I actually saw it when I was at CMU a bit ago (and was wondering what the hell it was).
There's a CMU press release about it.
The site with all the pictures is http://www.gigapan.org/
You can see the hardware here.
The only problem with this, and any other multi-picture stitching, is that you get obvious stitching problems when there is any movement in the scene, like the trolley in the middle of this scene.
Nevermind...
I think this just proves that higher resolution doesn't result in a higher quality photo.
If you look at the entire photo it doesn't look any better than a regular photo even if it contains much more information.
For years now there has been a push to larger and larger resolution photos with people often mistaking this with "quality."
All a higher resolution really allows you to do is zoom in more after a certain point. Which is awesome from a photo editing point of view, but for most people unimportant.
What you really want to be focusing on is the lens quality, zoom quality (lol Digital Zoom), noise, and other characteristics of the camera (e.g. ISO rating).
So it is great that they spent lot's of time doing this but it isn't all that interesting to average Joes or even serious photographers. We all really want better quality pictures, not bigger ones.
to my understanding, resolution refers to a mapping of the object on to the image - resolution is a ration of 1 cm in object/x cm in image
it has nothing to do with pixels per image, although you can have more of the object , at the same resolution, with more pixels
For some real vehicle distortion, remember Scanner Photography? Michael Golembewski built high-res cameras out of flatbed scanners; the model he described on this site took a 115-megapixel image--with each exposure.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
I've been doing this for years with a film camera and then sticky-taping all the photos together. Then when i want to "zoom in" I just move my head closer to the picture.
That's not really all that new. Motorized panorama heads have been around for a long time. People have even built them from Lego Technics.
As an avid pano/gigapixel photographer myself I'm interested in any new entry into the excessively priced head market. I'm using a Kadian Quickpan Pro that cost me $400 a few years ago. An automated system would be very nice but the cost is usually horrific. I've even had a head custom built at one point.
As for the use, I like to take big pictures. I have a 6ft x 3ft print hanging on my wall. The print is 400dpi taken from a 43000x22000 (just shy of 1GP). People see the picture and say it looks nice then walk a little closer, and closer, and closer. Pretty soon they are standing 4" away and excitedly reading the serial number on the front of a train car that is only 2" across on the print.
It doesn't work well for action shots though. Well, I guess it could if you eliminated the "single camera" requirement.
Besides, when we get to 10,000 dpi by about 12 bits per color, we will be as sharp as film. A 150 megapixel, normal-sized, 36-bit camera is probably 4-6 years away in the sub-$500 consumer market, sooner in the professional market.
Of course, for normal consumer 4x6 prints with no cropping, you don't need nearly that level of detail.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I worked for a SF area startup in 1990 that produced and sold cameras for "digital prepress" (later called "desktop publishing", and now just "publishing" ;) that had the highest resolution around, to compete with drum scanners that were then the expensive industry standard equipment.
We took a 512x512 Hitachi video sensor with a 2x2 C-M/Y-K mask repeated over it, for initial 1Kx1Kx40bit images that we derived from DSP on the intensity of the color-masked pixels. Then we physically stepped the sensor through 8x8 subpixel shifts, subsampling each pixel 64x. We ran the resulting 320MB raw composite files through a bank of multiple 25MFLOPS DSPs (interconnected and logic-accelerated by a fat FPGA) to produce 4Kx4Kx36bit 72MB files. In 1990 that was an awesome achievement.
We poured dramatic engineering work into that platform, which replaced a $150K drum scanner with a $30K PC (on DOS or Win3.0, or plus optional $5K Mac with its GUI including Photoshop 1.0). We had to deal with DSP for micropositioning the video sensor quickly (using feedback data from a laser/interferometer), with new color spaces (I was part of the JPEG org that produced the image format), with custom interconnects at blazing bandwidth, with parallel multiprocessing at then-supercomputer speeds written in C on DOS, and even with the physics of the light variably distorted by turbulence in the air between the camera and scanned slides, heated by the hot lights necessary for exposures fast enough to allow 64 frames and rescan before the sensor wiggled.
All for a 16Mpxl camera that's now beaten by big sensors on handheld consumer devices for under $2K (in 2008, not 1990, dollars). But I can proudly say that we beat them by almost 20 years.
--
make install -not war
right at Uma Thurman, please.
The beta sign-up ended October 19th, 2007. At 6 months almost to the day this story is hardly news.
For the 1000-megapixel porn industry.
-Nemo me impune lacessit-
Combine this with tourist remover http://www.snapmania.com/info/en/trm/ (take several pictures of the same scene, and only use the bits which are stationary).
That would make large pics without the motion distortion.
I can't wait to download a ~3gb sample image.
There is a guy masturbating in one of the windows when fully zoomed in. In the dormitory top floor, at the first (left) 3 windows across, it is the right most window.
I guess gigapixel photos are good for something...
here... - what's new ?
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thats pretty amazing...
There is also a woman blowing a guy in one of the windows.
Incredible detail or incredible redundancy?
When I think of detail, I think of zoom. Multiple pictures can help define some fuzzy areas, and assuming the subject doesn't change, correct for atmospheric distortion. However, as the naked eye staring at a distant object can't quite make out what is being seen, a whole bunch of fuzzy snapshots aren't going to give any big confidence improvement.
Aperture synthesis involves simultaneous processing of light to zoom by adding light that is in the same phase. A digital camera cannot match this kind of zooming by redundant images, which basically contain much of the same information, thus eating up a hard drive for no real gain.
I haven't read about the theory behind the digital camera used to make the multiple pictures so this may be what they're doing. If the camera is used to take many pictures over a prolonged time where the angle of the sun gradually varies, a kind of zoom may be achieved. The robot arm is intriguing--if the light source is constant and a static subject is only a few arm's lengths away, a magnified view of sorts might be achievable. I'm skeptical.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
... you might want to read more here.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Follow the link in the article to the photo. scroll down to the other photos. Look at the mad hatter's photo. At first it doesn't look like much, but it has been photoshopped to include lots of hidden stuff. If you have trouble, zoom in in the sidewalk cracks to get a start. There are at least 2 bunnies in each sidewalk joint. Have fun.
I found the egg in the basket with bunnies painted on it. I still need to find the purple bunny.
The truth shall set you free!
Autostitch "is the world's first fully automatic 2D image stitcher." The order in which you take the photos in not important, just that you cover everything and that there is plenty of overlap. You don't have to worry about keeping the camera horizontal -- it will rotate individual shots as needed. And you can ZOOM in on certain shots for more detail. I've used it to merge 154 shots into one panorama. Free.
True, you can put together a lot of composite pictures to achieve an arbitrary size and resolution. You can legitimately call the result a gigapixel picture (if it reaches the resolution requirement, of course). But that shouldn't be confused with a gigapixel camera, and in and by itself is not actually that impressive.
For example, if you take the entire photoset of Google Earth, you'd probably get a few peta-pixels worth of data. Ultimately, it all boils down to how much of that data is needed at any given time. You might need a low-detail, large-area image (e.g. view of Earth as a whole), or a high-detail, small-area image of your backyard. In either case, you wouldn't need more than at most a few dozen megapixels at any given time. It's unlikely anyone ever needs more than that size, whether they are studying galaxies or atoms, because the more detail you need, the less physical area you need covered, and vice versa.
Watch out, new ultra high rez pix of Paris Hilton are headed straight at ya! LOL
There are microscopes that play similar tricks. We have a couple the will compose images from 3x3 mosaics which are taken automatically by the camera.
Cameras that automatically do sub-pixel shifts between frames (for resolution) and that do frame-shifts (for large images) are commonly available in the marketplace.
Some others will instead bracket focus and automagically composite an image with a huge apparent depth-of-focus.
http://www.harlem-13-gigapixels.com/
I can find all of them but the camouflaged bunny. The closest I can come is the camo colored fabric in the bottom right hand corner saying something about 1at 20 emails would be entered into a a drawing for an easter gift. I'm sure it too late for that but I can't find the camo bunny. BTW, I can tell you where the purple bunny is.
A little motory gadget thingy. In the meantime, get yourself some Autostitch.
Tangentially related, here's a blog entry by an NPR staffer who was harassed and threatened with arrest for using a Gigapan in Union Station.
Meanwhile, some NPR reporters using the new gigapan camera were almost arrested for taking pictures with it at Union Station.
www.andycarvin.com
Another symptom of the knee jerk reaction against anything and everything unfamiliar in the War on Terror.
Take a look at http://www.gigapxl.org/. They take a single photo with more then 1 gigapixel. They are now aiming at 4 gigapixels.
So I guess, if you wanted to use multiple images to boost the resolution of a given scene past the sensor resolution of your camera, you'd take a stack of near-identical photos, use an editing package to blow them all up by a factor of, say, five or ten, so that all the photos show big square single-colour blocks at high magnification that correspond to single pixels in the original images, and then when the software has found the "best-fit" alignment and rotations for the different images, the overlapping transparent blocks should give you "sub-block" detail corresponding to sub-pixel detail at the original resolution?
That sounds like an interesting way of taking ultra-high resolution pictures of small objects without needing hideously expensive lenses and intense lighting. you could even make a custom tripod mount attachment that lets you lock the camera sensor at a fixed distance, and then rotate or slide the camera while you fire off pics.
Ideally, I guess you'd have a "smart" camera with a piezo device that could deliberately waggle the sensor between shots so that you could lock the camera completely and have the camera's own onboard processor fire off a volley of shots and then assemble a higher-res image all by itself (after a wait).
I wonder how long it'll be before this starts turning up on Canon and Sony "consumer" cameras and on cameraphones as a standard feature? It's probably a lot cheaper than improving the optics or the sensors. Downside: you have a moving part to go wrong.
More thinks ... if you were building the thing into the camera itself, I guess you could have the lens tilting so that the image is panned diagonally across the sensor. That'd give guaranteed extra resolution without rotating the image. I don't know whether you'd be able to do this accurately to sub-pixel resolution, or whether you'd just use "noise" to pan diagonally and hope for the best. Or just hope that the photographer has a wobbly tripod! :)
Eric Baird