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The 2.5 gigapixel photo - made in the Netherlands
Dennis Hissink : November 16th 2004 - 09:45 CET
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 TNO has produced the largest digital panoramic photo in the world. So, what do we mean by large? After all, modern consumer cameras can easily take a picture with 5 million pixels. Well, we are talking about a photo of completely different dimensions. One with 2.5 billion pixels - that's 500 times more pixels. If this photo were printed, it would measure 6.67 m by 2.67 m (300 dpi). The photograph shows Delft and its surroundings in the autumn of 2004. It was taken the top of the Electrical Engineering faculty of Delft University, at a height of about 100 m, by TNO. The 2.5 gigapixel image is a composition of images rather than a single image. TNO developed a sophisticated approach to merge the many images - all 600 of them.
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 The photos were taken automatically using a modern consumer camera and a powerful 400 mm lens. The camera was positioned automatically using a computer-controlled pan-tilt unit. Each of the 600 photos overlaps, an arrangement that ensured very accurate positioning and enabled us to stitch the images automatically into one giant image of 78,797 by 31,565 pixels. The most difficult tasks were processing these large images and comparing the overlapping images.
All 600 photos were taken over a period of 1 hour and 15 minutes. Taking a single photo and moving the camera to a new position took approximately seven seconds. Thanks to the long 'exposure time', some interesting artefacts are visible at the edges of the various photos.
For more information about this exciting project click on the link below... |
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