Getting the Big Picture Quickly
01 Nov 2010
University of Utah computer scientists developed software that quickly edits "extreme resolution imagery" - huge photographs containing billions to hundreds of billions of pixels or dot-like picture elements. Until now, it took hours to process these "gigapixel" images. The new software needs only seconds to produce preview images useful to doctors, intelligence analysts, photographers, artists, engineers and others.
By sampling only a fraction of the pixels in a massive image - for example, a satellite photo or a panorama made of hundreds of individual photos - the software can produce good approximations or previews of what the fully processed image will look like.
That allows someone to interactively edit and analyze massive images - pictures larger than a gigapixel (billion pixels) - in seconds rather than hours, says Valerio Pascucci, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Utah and its Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute.
"You can go anywhere you want in the image," he says. "You can zoom in, go left, right. From your perspective, it is as if the full 'solved' image has been computed."
He compares the photo-editing software with public opinion polling: "You ask a few people and get the answer as if you asked everyone. It's exactly the same thing."
The new software - Visualization Streams for Ultimate Scalability, or ViSUS - allows gigapixel images stored on an external server or drive to be edited from a large computer, a desktop or laptop computer, or even a smart phone, Pascucci says.
