Robotic Camera Extension Takes Gigapixel Photos 102
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."
Not so novel (Score:5, Interesting)
ALE (Score:5, Interesting)
Any superresolution software for average Joe? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not so novel (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.
This and tourist remover... (Score:1, Interesting)
That would make large pics without the motion distortion.
Autostitch does it automatically (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:We Did It in 1990 (Score:3, Interesting)
Once the camera was initially calibrated we'd use a test target to test how well I'd calibrated the film recorder. We printed a slide of Lenna, then scanned and reprinted it a few times through our DSP convergence algorithm, adjusting the film recorder's colorspace instead of the camera. Then we doubled a Lenna scan/print over a purely photographic repro of Lenna and scanned that subtractive image, calibrating the camera until it converged.