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Making the World's Largest Panoramic Photo
Iddo Genuth writes: In order to create the largest panoramic picture ever taken (using commercially available gear), a team of international photographers led by Italian photographer Filippo Blengini had to climb to an altitude of 3500 metres, wait for two weeks in a temperature of minus 10 degrees Celsius, look for a sunny, bright day, and then spend 35 hours shooting. During this time they shot over 70,000 images, which were combined in to the giant 365 Gigapxiel panorama using a special robotic head with a long 400mm telephoto lens (and a 2x Extender).
But the work didn't end up in the snowy Alps — when the team got back they had with them no less than 46TB of images which they needed to process in order to create one giant interactive image, 365 Gigapixels in size. This processing required some very powerful hardware and took over two months to complete, but the result is a look at the Mont Blanc (the tallest mountain in the Alps and the highest peak in Europe outside of the Caucasus range raising 4,810 meters or 15,781 feet above sea level) — like it has never been seen before.
But the work didn't end up in the snowy Alps — when the team got back they had with them no less than 46TB of images which they needed to process in order to create one giant interactive image, 365 Gigapixels in size. This processing required some very powerful hardware and took over two months to complete, but the result is a look at the Mont Blanc (the tallest mountain in the Alps and the highest peak in Europe outside of the Caucasus range raising 4,810 meters or 15,781 feet above sea level) — like it has never been seen before.
Wasn't this done with some cities as well?
The article forgot to mention that the team has hidden a life-size Waldo in the photo. Can you find him?
So, basically your're telling me we can capture images in 365 Gigapixels now. Okay, I want a monitor to display this, a video card(s) to render textures that size and of course a new Cry engine to run video games in at this resolution (at 60fps!).
Meanwhile, I hope I never have kids who want to go to college 'cause I'm putting all my savings towards that equipment...
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
somewhere out there...
Under the platform with the crane, with his back to the camera?
They didn't do a very good job of stitching the photos together. Much of the detail is repeated. For example, look just down and to the left of the gondola: the snow banks are repeated twice (one set on top and the other set a bit below). Then if you zoom out, you'll realize that much of that section of snow is repeated. Look to the right, in the rougher terrain, and again the same details are repeated in a tiled format. It's like this throughout the "photograph," and you can't tell what's real and what's incorrect.
For a huge image: success. For a huge image that actually shows what's really there: fail.
If you're allowed to take tens of thousands of separate pictures and move the camera with a robotic arm, wouldn't the largest panoramic picture in the world be Google StreetView?
Did anyone else misread the title as "World's Largest Pornographic Photo"?
The viewer lets me resize it to be wide but refuses to be taller, so I only get to use the top 1/3 or so of my 4K display!
I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time.
Of course, you won't hear about it slashdot.
There is a crane and a new building going up on one of the peaks. Anyone know what that is?
I don't know about cities, but this is routinely done with overhead imagery. You can pan smoothly across the entire landmass and snowmass of the planet.
There are sections with repeated patterns, which suggests the algorithm that pasted together the pictures messed up quite badly. In some parts I found the same pattern pasted four times (unfortunately they didn't provide a mechanism to extract links to particular views).
This is just an awful amateurish mess. This is not that great an achievement and certainly wouldn't require a supercomputer to accomplish these days but they've even managed to stuff up the modest task they assigned themselves. There are lighting mismatches (understandable given the duration of teh shoot) But the really bad artifacts are things like a massive seam at the edge of the "360" degree panorama, huge blurry areas that they have not shot properly and pasty silhouette artifacts on things like the crane. I don't know what minimum standards might be required to call yourself the biggest panorama but for me this falls well short of the mark. It's an over hyped failure. If you're going to toot your own horn at least do competent work first..
Actually, there IS a Bond villain-looking stronghold in there, it even has a very large missile-looking thing. The detail is so amazing you can even see people around it (presumably henchmen henching). I wish the display app had coordinates so I could point you there.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
I spun it around twice... meh?
My realtor has a camera that can pretty much do that... It's cooler looking than my kitchen but still, seems like a lot of effort.
Diverging shadows strike again...you'd think these hoaxers would learn from their past mistakes.
Well, the final product is a thing of beauty. I love how the black sections contrast with the snowy peaks.
I just have one question: Why did they name this mountain after a pen?
Have gnu, will travel.
...experience.
Fuck Off.
70000 pictures = 46 TB ?
This makes 689 MB per picture. Wow !
I thought my 36 MPix / 46 MB RAWs were huge already !
Totof
Javascript only. And wants to give me a "cookie experience".
Prefer to look at the Mont Blanc "in person" anyway.
I don't think so.
I think it's more likely that they shot over 70,000 images using a special robotic head with a long 400mm telephoto lens, which were combined in to the giant 365 Gigapxiel[sic] panorama.
At the bottom of the
I have made many, many panoramas, but none in the multi-gigapixel range, so I realize that they had a very tough stitching job, but even so: This was a pretty bad job!
All the central snow fields look like the result of randomly placed images: With a motorized pano head they should have been able to locate each image pretty accurately even before they started the SIFT runs to look for matching key points (which can be hard in a blue sky or on white snow).
More problematic is the fact that they must have done the actual stitching pretty much without proper blending from one image to the next:
Within the first minute of zooming around in the image I stumbled across a perfectly straight line with totally different exposure/lighting on each side, giving an almost black/white boundary that screams "This isn't natural!".
The proper way to blend such images is to use a multi-spectral approach: Low frequency information (like average light level) is blended across the entire overlap, while higher frequencies use narrower and narrower bands. Doing it this way means that even if one image had a clear blue sky and the next was taken when the sun was hidden by a cloud, the overlap is nearly perfect.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Re: TFA
1) Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in the Alps, not Europe. The Caucusus range reaches higher.
2) It is not the 11th highest mountain in the world. Not even hundred-and-11th. It is the eleventh most prominent. Prominence is a contrived value that basically says how much the the mountain juts out from its surroundings. "The prominence of a peak is the minimum height of climb to the summit on any route from a higher peak, or from sea level if there is no higher peak. The lowest point on that route is the col."
Thus Mount McKinley's prominence is measured with respect to Anconcagua in Argentina. Very meaningful, hmm?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
It is not a photeo, it is a collage that is turned into an image.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Hate to undermine what they did here... but this is a pretty shoddy stitching job. Granted, with the number of images they used, it's impressive work, but the result is full of errors (and that's not a pixel nitpick - there are numerous glaringly obvious stitching issues). Interesting, but hardly noteworthy.
Okay, lousy stitching already being mentioned, but I also doubt the motive. Endless snow fields with the least interest, and you'll never know how small/large you have zoomed in. One of the few interesting, recognizable, parts is the building site with crane. Wow, that comes out pretty nice, though. But 99% of 46 TB is almost wasted storage space. I'm amazed by the overall panorama, and said building site.
In no case any reason to stay up for a fortnight at minus 10C.
There is more to see in the panoramic photo of NYC.
http://time.com/world-trade-ce...
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...