New system makes any digital camera take multibillion-pixel shots

Un nou sistem transformă orice cameră foto digitală într-un aparat superperformant, capabil să redea imagini cu miliarde de pixeli. Mai mulţi pasionaţi de tehnică de la Carnegie Mellon University, folosind şi expertiza oamenilor de ştiinţă din departamente ale NASA, au pus la punct un dispozitiv să poată produce imagini de panoramă cu gigapixeli, aşa-numitele GigaPans.



The technology gives people a new way to make and share images of their environment. It is being used by students to document their communities and by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to make Civil War sites accessible on the Web. To promote further sharing of this imagery, Carnegie Mellon has launched a public Web site, http://www.gigapan.org , where people can upload and interactively explore panoramic images of any format.

Researchers have begun a public beta process with the GigaPan hardware, Web site, and software. The hardware technology enabling GigaPan images is a robotic camera mount, jointly designed and manufactured by Charmed Labs of Austin Texas (www.charmedlabs.com). The tripod-like mount makes it possible for a digital camera to take hundreds of overlapping images of landscapes, buildings or rooms. Then, using software developed by Carnegie Mellon and Ames, these images can be arranged in a grid and digitally stitched together into a single image that could consist of tens of billions of pixels.
Source: Carnegie Mellon University