Monday, October 30, 2006

Its 8.6GigaPixel Whoosh!!

"How many mega pixels?", its a typical question from anybody who sees a digital camera these days. I just came across a blog, it was talking about some one creating a 8.6Gigapixel photo. Big deal I have a 8.1 Mega pixel camera. Hold on! Hold on! he's talking of 8.6 Giga that's a thousand times bigger than what I currently have and for sure a thousand times bigger than that offered by any other commercial camera available.

I just could not hold my excitement to let you all out there know of this little large wonder. Please go to this site(http://haltadefinizione.deagostini.it/) and see for your self what they have created. The source for the above information is this post on slashdot. Its interesting to see the details of the making of the above picture. I am not sure, you will have the time to refer to another link, so I will copy the slashdot post over here. Please do visit this site, it has some amazing posts.

The Largest Digital Photo (From Slashdot)

Gigapixel writes to point us to what is claimed to be the largest digital photo on the Net, at 8.6 Gigapixel. It is a composite photo of the "Parete Gaudenziana," a fresco painted by Gaudenzio Ferrari, dated 1513. This fresco is in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in the convent of Varallo Sesia, diocese of Novara and Province of Vercelli, Italy. The site uses Flash to let you explore the fresco over a zoom range of more than 180 to 1. The photo is made up of 1145 images, each 12.2 Mpixel and 16 bits per color channel. Read on for more technical specs of the photo.

Photo Shots: 1,145
Computed Data: 84 Gigabyte
Computed Pixels: 13,982,996,480
Color Depth: 16 bit per channel

Cropped Image Size: 8,604,431,000 (w. 96,679 x h. 89,000) pixel
Image Size before the final crop: 10,293,864,000 pixel (w. 103,560 x h. 99,400) pixel
Size on Hard Disk of the 3x16 bit final image: 51,625,586,000 byte

Size of Photographed Scene: 10.80 m x 9.94 m (35.43 ft x 32.61 ft), corresponding to 107.35 m2 (1155.37 ft2).

True Scale Resolution: 227 dpi
Pixel Density: 80 pixel/mm2
Linear Pixel Density: 9 pixel/mm

Hard Disk space dedicated to 16 bit computing: 1.8 Terabyte
Ram: 16 Gigabyte
Processors: 4 x AMD Opteron(TM) 885 Dual Core 64 bit

Shooting on January 30, 2006
Shooting time: 13 hours
Computing time: 3 months
Final Image generated on June 15, 2006

-------------------------(Slashdot post ends)-----------------------------

The size of the above photo is about a big one BHK(Bedroom-Hall-Kitchen) or infact a small two BHK in the city of Bangalore. Now surprising how much time and resources it took them to make it. May be I will ask these guys at Gigapixel for a photo of mine at 8.6GigaPixel (I still can't imagine) .

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Forgive me for nitpicking but talking about the size of the photo makes no sense until you specify the dpi!

Anyway I don't really see why this is called the single biggest photo? Because of the way its stored or because of the way its acquired. Google and nasa surely have bigger datasets. I don't think these are stored any differently from the google data sets. One surely can't store it like an ordinary image in a contiguous manner, will end up thrashing at every level in the memory hierarchy from harddisk to CPU data cache simply to access a pixel one row below :) I guess they are disqualified as photos because the images were taken over a large period of time possibly months whereas this was acquired over 13 hours.

Btw, if this were an oil painting, or any painting where the surface texture is not smooth, then perhaps it would be very useful for art students to examine the roughness/ strokes. But since a photo like this wouldn't cut it even at this detail, they should also capture the heightfield of the painting. Now to explore that would be awesome! Tilt it a bit and you see parts of the painting occluding itself. Woot!

Unknown said...

Dude.. (To sandy),
Its good (nitpicking) gives you a chance to think.
i)dpi is specified (refer slashdot post).
ii) I agree, for the system requirements, and from what they say, it is a single contigious image.
iii) I dont get the part, "I guess they are disqualified stuff....."?

iv) And coming to the surface texture stuff, I totally agree with you. It would be great. But I don't think they can do it with the way they followed.

v) In scintific and industrical purposes where a very extrremely high resolution image is required this service is very useful as it throws out a great possibilities for analysis.