Software for superresolution image viewing?

[homercles337]

This is only related to photography because i need to view a big image (529,000,000 pixels). Its not a panorama, its actually scientific data. Im giving a talk and would like to zoom in and out from the global, down to the pixel level with a windows app. I know there must be something that will do this (i have seen the SeaDragon/Photosynth Ted presentation), but all my searches have not produced fruit.

 

[corkyg]

What is the image format? RAW? How will you present it? Projector? Direct view? I guess that is 529 MP. What are the H & V components? (Aspect ratio.) (If square it would be 29 MP x 29 MP)

 

[homercles337]

The image format is png, but i can convert in photoshop. I can load whatever software i need on my laptop (xp pro) and run it that way, so it is displaying on a projector (1024x768). The image is square (i clustered a similarity matrix) at ~23k x 23k. The display can be whatever resolution, because i want to zoom in so that more and more detail is shown at each level. Basically, every pixel is a data point in a symmetric square matrix. If i had the time i would just write something to do a pyramid decomposition with a ROI. This is basically what the picture viewer side (not the 3D rendering) of seadragon/photosynth does, but in realtime. :Q I thought panaroma viewers would work, but i havent found one that does the job yet (most break because of the size, or cost $). The png is about 1.24GB color & a third of that for greyscale (obviously).

 

[corkyg]

OK - that is really an interesting prospect. Resolution-wise, you can't display more than the projector will allow. But . . . try this.

Display your picture full screen in Irfanview, and then use (under View) the Zoom In function keyed to the + key. It just keeps zooming in one click at a time until you eventually see square pixels.

And - the good news is, it's free!

 

[homercles337]

Hmm, my laptop has 1GB of memory, my home and work machines have 2GB and 4GB (only 3GB effective), respectively, and they choke on images this big. I suspect my laptop would die. Im not even sure if irfanview can display an image like like this. Like i said compressed (lossless, mind you), this image is 1.24 GB. I suppose i could use the greyscale, but it would be nice to show the color one. I have tried to load it into a couple "panorama viewing" apps and they all die.

 

[corkyg]

I would add another gig of ram to the laptop. I have 2 GB in both of mine - they handle large RAW images quite well. I used to use RAW Shooter Pro by Pixmantec, but they got acquired by Adobe.

Try Irfanview - it will cost you nothing - it's free.

This costs $$$:

RAW

 

[homercles337]

Yea, im aware of irfanview. I have never had the need to use it though since being an academic means that i will always have access to photoshop for free. I do like that the irfanview footprint is really small though. My expertise is in image analysis and i have never had to deal with images that were as big as 500 million pixels. Im in the realm where 32-bit computing is just not going to cut it. Im looking for a cheap (academic) 64-bit version of vista, but all i find are 32-bit. So now, the question is what are the current 64-bit photo manipulation apps? I see that photoshop is *not* one of them.

Edit: I should also mention that this image/data with 500 million pixels is likely to be ~20x larger in the next few weeks.

 

[corkyg]

Fascinating situation! I did a little looking around at 64-bit stuff - and this white paper looked interesting:

Blanco

CS3

 

[dlerious]

I've been using FastStone Image Viewer although I don't have any pictures that large. It may be worth a look www.faststone.org

 

[homercles337]

Originally posted by: corkyg
Fascinating situation! I did a little looking around at 64-bit stuff - and this white paper looked interesting:

Blanco

CS3

Interesting link that Panorama Factory site. Its nice that they support 64-bit, im going to have to follow up on that. However, like i mentioned in a previous post those panorama viewers like to "stitch" a bunch of small images. Mine starts at 500 million, i just need to view it and zoom in and out. Out to see global patterns and in to say pixel 2345, 8765 and see what the value there is. I plan to write something so that when you zoom in and click a pixel the data behind that pixel will be available. This is new realm of data visualization where data sets are getting so big that "conventional" means fail. Heres the thing too. The data set im using is for development (23k) which is a subset of our real data set of ~700,000. The small data set of 23k is going to grow on its own to 460k. This also means that the "full" data set may also do the same and grow to 14M. Imagine an image that is 196,000,000,000,000 pixels! :Q Given that 64-bit machines can address 2^64 bytes this is possible.

@dlerious, i already have photoshop which is free for me and it can read/write that 500M pixel image fine (albeit very slow because of swapping), but the zoom is a dog and wont serve my purposes well. Thanks for the input though.

 

[sciencewhiz]

If you just need it for a presentation, use photoshop to do the zooming, etc, take screenshots, then paste those into power point. Then, zooming speed won't be an issue when you do the presentation.

529 million pixels is 23000x23000, and is almost 4 gigs uncompressed. If you want to zoom, etc without swapping, you'll need at least 4 gigs of memory in almost any program. If you're data is really going to grow as big as you think, you will probably need to write your own program that can preprocess the image, index it, cache it, etc because 80 gigs of memory is hard to come by.

 

[homercles337]

Originally posted by: sciencewhiz
If you just need it for a presentation, use photoshop to do the zooming, etc, take screenshots, then paste those into power point. Then, zooming speed won't be an issue when you do the presentation.

529 million pixels is 23000x23000, and is almost 4 gigs uncompressed. If you want to zoom, etc without swapping, you'll need at least 4 gigs of memory in almost any program. If you're data is really going to grow as big as you think, you will probably need to write your own program that can preprocess the image, index it, cache it, etc because 80 gigs of memory is hard to come by.

Yea, thats what i did, except that i just cropped, resized, and saved in photoshop. It will work for the presentation im giving on friday, but the coolness factor wont be as big. MIT has a 32-bit version of vista, but im trying to get my hands on a 64-bit version (even 64-bit XP would be find with me). If i can get something interactively working with the "small" 500 million pixel image, then scaling to bigger data sets shouldnt be a problem.