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Robotic Camera Extension Takes Gigapixel Photos
Posted by
timothy
on Sat May 17, 2008 01:31 PM
from the ale-and-hugin-together-robotically dept.
from the ale-and-hugin-together-robotically dept.
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."
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26 Gigapixel Photo Sets New World Record 113 comments
FrenchSilk writes "The largest gigapixel photograph ever created with a DSLR camera was made by A.F.B. Media GmbH in Dresden, Germany. 1655 images, each 21.6 megapixels in size, were taken with a Canon 5D Mark II and a 400 mm lens over a period of 176 minutes. The images were stitched on a 16 processor system with 48GB of main memory, taking 94 hours to create the final result. The interactive view can be found here."
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Not so novel (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not so novel (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, the MIT work is well known to anyone in this area. It's not that hard to google some of the keywords and get the MIT page. The CMU people either knew and ignored it, or they simply didn't do what most of the scientists at their institution usually do, which is read the standard conference papers in computer vision, and browse the web (just a little!!). It's not as if the MIT work was published in some obscure place.
Parent
Re:Not so novel (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We Did It in 1990 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Once the camera
ALE (Score:5, Interesting)
Any superresolution software for average Joe? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Any superresolution software for average Joe? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
But can't you infinitely zoom into a normal photo? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Which is rather ironic since the Photomerge routine in Photoshop CS3 is quite adept at taking multiple hand shot images and stitching them together. Traditionally, photographers have used leveling tripods and paid careful attention to exposures. While this can lead to better results than a hand shot and stitch, the latter is awfully good. The intelligenc
$279, applications for beta testing open (Score:3, Informative)
1000 megapixel? (Score:5, Funny)
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. [xkcd.com]
Some Links (Score:4, Informative)
There's a CMU press release [cmu.edu] about it.
The site with all the pictures is http://www.gigapan.org/ [gigapan.org]
You can see the hardware here [charmedlabs.com].
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 [gigapan.org].
Higher Resolution != Higher Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Higher Resolution != Higher Quality (Score:5, Informative)
1. Resolution (the number of pixels in am image, here increased by stitching overlapping images)
2. Dynamic range, color fidelity, noise (the quality of a particular pixel). This can be somewhat ameliorated by HDR photography or just averaging identical shots (all with no moving subjects and a sturdy tripod). Google Photomatix for details.
3. Whether the shot is interesting, well composed, in focus, without motion blur, etc. Panorama photography is most interesting for its artistic potential; more pixels is just a delightful side effect.
#1 and #2 can be addressed by money and a willingness to prostrate yourself to the camera gods. #3 requires talent!
And to put a final nail in the megapixel coffin: check out http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Equivalent-Lenses.shtml [luminous-landscape.com] (particularly Nathan Nyhrvold's comments) for a discussion of how sensor size and f-stop place an upper bound on resolution irrespective of sensor density. Physics can be a pain sometimes!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I was expecting to see good quality all the way down to the highest zoom. something like google-earth quality for the most part. They don't let you just keep zooming in past the point where the resolution has hit the wall like this does
misuse of word resolution (Score:3, Insightful)
it has nothing to do with pixels per image, although you can have more of the object , at the same resolution, with more pixels
Big Deal! (Score:4, Funny)
Another entry into the market is always welcome (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This kind [epson.co.uk].
Also ... (Score:3, Informative)
... you might want to read more here [wikipedia.org].
Gigapixel picture != Gigapixel camera (Score:3, Insightful)
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.