Numonohi.Nation's Most Recent Favorites

Bird of Paradise Outing 1993

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 03:11:03 Z

Group Shot Test Synth

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:11:21 Z

The Courts

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:01:33 Z

by Nathanael "This was a test to see how Photosynth would react to my giving it a smaller, constrained group of photos from Numonohi, namely the basketball/volleyball/tennis courts. The photos that do actually match usually have pretty pleasing transitions, but it drives me crazy not having any way to help Photosynth see the connections that I see between the groups."

What are the odds

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:27:28 Z

by Nathanael "This was my first naive test of Photosynth on a grand scale. I made a quick grab in my photo archive for anything that looked related to my old school's campus and accidentally included a few shots of a sports tournament held elsewhere as well as a few photos from another facility, ITF. I knew, even at this stage, that the ultra low resolution of many of the photos taken on the ground with the earliest digital cameras from the Journalism class held so little detail that they held little chance of sticking to the higher resolution photos, but at this point I was simply curious. Being optimistic or cynical is all well and good but nothing beats an actual process of testing. Not long after I made this synth, I learned that although Photosynth uploads the full resolution photos to the web to view, it actually uses 1.5 to 2 megapixel versions of your photos to perform the image feature extraction and subsequent matching. This is because unleashing the Photosynth image feature algorithm(s) on the full resolution photos would yield far more details than the average personal computer is capable of holding in memory while Photosynth compares them all to each other in order to arrange the photos. Using smaller versions of the photos means that we can match more photos together, providing we supply photos which actually share common features. What I realized after this synth was that I could crop out 2 megapixel details from higher resolution shots and when they are synthed, their detail will remain in the image feature detection and matching phases. Because of my lack of photos of the area and the extreme unlikeliness of getting any photos to fill in the gaps between those currently in my possession, this method could, at the least, serve as a way to ensure higher accuracy and a higher synthy percentage among the aerial photos. I did a few preliminary tests using this method, the only remaining example being my 'Further Attempts at Synthesis' synth. For the time being, connecting ground shots to aerial shots will require new photos to be taken, preferably better quality than what is used here. All of the above aside, this still serves well as an incredible photo gallery as long as you have a broadband connection. Switch to grid view after you've gotten into the photos which don't really match any others and zoom in and out to your heart's content."

Further Attempts At Synthesis

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:26:02 Z

by Nathanael "This is the campus of the boarding school that I attended growing up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. It's located several kilometres outside of Goroka, the capital of the Eastern Highlands Province. If you're new to viewing synths, here are a few things to keep in mind: You can zoom into any photo using your mouse scrollwheel/ball, the [plus] and [minus] keys, or the icons along the edge of the viewer. It only loads as much of each photo as you need for your current view but they're all much higher resolution than they initially appear and more detail will load as you zoom into it. Using the [p] key after you've clicked once on the synth, you can cycle through: a) photos and point cloud b) point cloud only c) photos only. As you can see by my 56% Synthy score for this synth, only 56% of the photos were able to stick to each other. You can see the groups more easily by switching to grid view (use the [~] key). The photos that didn't match any others will be found in the group at the very bottom, and remember you can still zoom right down to any detail. If you're viewing this on a Windows computer, the older Direct3D viewer is much much faster than the current Silverlight one, so give it a go if you can. You'll find the link to it on the lower left corner of this page. Thanks to Dave Pierce and Donnell Trostrud for giving me view of my old home and thanks to the Photosynth team for making an incredible program. Thanks for stopping by and feel free to comment, poro."