Tag: Gigapixel

I was working on a story about something completely different today when I came across this intriguing digital image technology they’ve been working on for a while over at Microsoft Research. The team sums up their not-too-lofty goal for their HD View technology as follows: “…to create the best picture given (a) a source with high resolution, arbitrary dynamic range, any field of view & color gamut; (b) the user’s interaction; and (c) the display being used.” HD View allows for smooth panning and zooming of extremely high resolution images which have been stitched together from hundreds or thousands of individual images using tools like Microsoft’s free Image Composite Editor.

Satellite imagery has become part of our everyday lives through applications like Google Maps. However, the current technology involves capturing tons of high-resolution images and stitching them together to form one larger image. This not only creates a huge amount of work to precisely align these images, it also leaves live-action surveillance susceptible to drop-outs as subjects move between cameras (yeah, I’ve seen 24 too). It turns out that a team from Sony and the University of Alabama are working on an imaging system that can capture a huge area with a single camera.