Software Lets Consumer Cameras Take Billion-Pixel Images

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,356116,00.html

Software Lets Cameras Take Billion-Pixel Images
Thursday , May 15, 2008


A device that lets a camera take pictures with 100 times the resolution of the most advanced models on the market is poised to revolutionize amateur photography.

The Gigapan allows people to take pictures which are more than a gigapixel — or 1,000 megapixels — in size, effectively turning a single photograph into a panoramic experience, around which the viewer can navigate on a computer.

Yet the actual camera used is no more specialized than a regular digital model.

The Gigapan uses a robot mounted on a tripod to command a normal camera to take several hundred separate photographs of a single scene — each at a slightly different angle.

The individual photographs are then stitched together by software on the owner's computer — much as amateurs have attempted to do for years by after taking several pictures of a wide landscape, only with more impressive results.

• Click here for more from the Times of London. http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3938717.ece

So how many pixels were being used by that camera that was taking pictures of a city landscape, then letting the computer user literally zoom in to a single window without loss of much resolution? I remember a beach scene as well from that same camera where the tiny little faraway dots were people that could be magnified until you'd have no problem recognizing a single individual (I think some of those people may have even been nudists).

A bit misleading. It's not actually taking a hundred meg image but combining several images. The meg size is limited to what the sensor in the camera can 'see'. Software ma give an illusion of a higher meg images but it's not truly a image taken AS 100mp.

This isn't really revolutionary. This technique already existed, and the tools to do it already existed and have been used routinely in the dslr world for years. Panorama photos are somewhat routine nowadays, with special tripod heads for accurate panning of a scene, plus turning off automatic white balance and other auto settings, and then taking the photos, and many different software packages exist for "stitching" the photos together into a panorama.
The only thing revolutionary in the story is that someone would use a point and shoot model camera that has lower resolution than an average dslr.

Yes, but the FINAL product is apparently a billion pixel picture, which is how I read the story. Not that the software was going to magically transform the ability of a digital camera. So my other comments really aren't all that relevant, either (I was just ruminating on digital technology in general), because unless the digital camera itself has the ability to image distant objects, no amount of digital enhancement is going to put the actual face on a person two miles away.

I laughed for days about that scene in "Enemy of the State" where the bad guys took a store camera image and rotated it to an angle the camera couldn't possibly have seen, then were able to spot the bulge in Will Smith's shopping bag to realize their quarry had given Will the evidence.