Researchers at the University of Utah are demonstrating a new software tool they call ‘VISUS’ (Visualization Streams for Ultimate Scalability) that allows interactive editing on massive multi-gigapixel images.
In one example, they used the software to perform “seamless cloning,” which means taking one image and merging it with another image. They combined a 3.7-gigapixel image of the entire Earth with a 116-gigapixel satellite photo of the city of Atlanta, zooming in on the Gulf of Mexico and putting Atlanta underwater there.
“An artist can interactively place a copy of Atlanta under shallow water and recreate the lost city of Atlantis,” says the new study, which is titled, “Interactive Editing of Massive Imagery Made Simple: Turning Atlanta into Atlantis.”
The work was funded by the US Department of Energy & the NSF, the researchers are already planning a company to commercialize the work. The technology shows promise in fields like surveillance and national security, where massive satellite images can be a bit daunting to deal with, especially when an analyst might have to deal with several hundred of them over the period of a few months to monitor equipment movements.
