Capturing and Viewing Gigapixel Images

  • Johannes Kopf ,
  • Matt Uyttendaele ,
  • Michael Cohen

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2007) |

Published by Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.

Parts of our system are implemented in the browser based HD View, which comes with example gigapixel images, code and instructions to get your own gigapixel imagery online. Check out http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView.htm.

We present a system to capture and view “Gigapixel images”: very high resolution, high dynamic range, and wide angle imagery consisting of several billion pixels each. A specialized camera mount, in combination with an automated pipeline for alignment, exposure compensation, and stitching, provide the means to acquire Gigapixel images with a standard camera and lens. More importantly, our novel viewer enables exploration of such images at interactive rates over a network, while dynamically and smoothly interpolating the projection between perspective and curved projections, and simultaneously modifying the tone-mapping to ensure an optimal view of the portion of the scene being viewed.