2.5 gigapixel zoomable image of Delft

This is pretty good. Some enterprising pixel bashers at a Dutch research company called TNO, have made a 2.5 Gpixel image of Delft. Even better, it's presented in a pan/zoom flash interface called Zoomify, which makes for a very satisfying way to explore the photo in detail (I hadn't seen zoomify before, but it's a huge step forward from what we were doing with OpenPix/flashpix a few years ago, neat stuff).

Figure 1: 3:05pm in Delft

There's a lot of good infoporn on the site about how this image was made from a composite of 600 images taken over more than an hour, using a Nikon D1x digital camera mounted on a computer controlled motion head. Some interesting facts:

Final image dimensions: 78.797 x 31.565 pixels
Number of pixels in final image: 2,487,227,305 (2.5 gigapixel)
Final image file format: 24-bit colour bitmap
Final image file size: 7.5 GBytes
Number of source images: 600
Number of pixels in source images: 3,537,408,000 (600 images * 3008*1960)
Lens focal length: 400 mm (equivalent to 600 mm on a 35 mm camera)
Aperture: F22, Shutter speed: 1/100, ISO: 125
Horizontal field of view of final image: 93 degrees
Time required to capture component images: 1 hour and 12 minutes
Time required to match overlapping images: 20 hours
Time required to optimise project: 4 hours
Time required to compose the image: 3 full days using 5 high-end pcs
Time required to blend seams / correct misalignments / finalise image: 2 days

Now if only we could get this in a real-time heads-up display...with hotspots of course ;-)

Posted by Gene at November 17, 2004 06:24 PM | TrackBack