bohnsack.com

I got back from a two week business trip to southern India last weekend. It
was a very interesting experience.

Many photos are available here. A few select ones are shown below:

General People, Places, and Things of India

Team Members and Me in India

Vechicles

What Marxism Gets You

When processing JPEG images taken with a digital camera, you often want rotate the images that were taken in portrait orientation, so that they appear "right side up" on your computer monitor.

For example,

This is easy enough in a many GUI image manipulation packages, but it tends to be tedious for a large number of images. Further, if you're not careful to use the right options, the rotation process will uncompress and recompress the images, degrading their quality.

Thankfully, there's an awesome command line utility called jhead that does lossless JPEG rotation and a whole lot more. Here's an example. Quick, easy, and scriptable:

$ jhead -autorot *
Modified: IMG_1007.JPG
Modified: IMG_1037.JPG
Modified: IMG_1038.JPG
Modified: IMG_1039.JPG
...

jhead's author has a very interesting home page, including information on a home-made mechanical organ and a link to Raphi Giangiulio's Homemade Pipe Organ, which is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

I made another attempt at acquiring source images for my Thesis on Friday.

The images below were taken on top of the UNM bookstore looking out at the new Architecture building, the Frontier restaurant, and Central Avenue.

Before: 2,336 × 3,504 pixel (~ 8.1 MegaPixel) source images arranged in a 3x15 matrix

Summary

The digital panoramic photo mosaic process involves taking multiple overlapping source photographs of a scene from slightly different vantage points and then digitally "stitching" these images together to form a single composite image that appears as if is was taken from a higher resolution and a possibly wider angle camera.

An example of photo mosaic of UNM's Zimmerman Library follows. A 2×11 matrix of source photographs is shown, followed by the processed mosaic:

Before: 2,336 × 3,504 pixel (~ 8.1 MegaPixel) source images arranged in a 2x11 matrix

After: photo mosaic: 16,961 × 5,792 pixels (~ 98 MegaPixels)

This 16,961 × 5,792 pixel image is big!

One way to think about its size would be to print it out at a relatively standard 200 pixels per inch. If you did so, the print would about 7 × 2.4 feet.

Another way to think its size is to look at a small 100%-scale cropped portion of the image like the one shown below:

If you look carefully, you can see this student crossing the plaza in the right hand portion of the full mosaic.

For full-resolution high-quality output, creating one of these composite panoramas is not a trivial computational task. An example like the one shown above can take hours on a modern workstation, while processing extremely large examples like Max Lyon's GigaPixel image can take many days.

I propose an MS Thesis that will demonstrate how the performance of digital panoramic photo mosaic compositing can be improved through parallel computing. The goal will be to take a multi-day real-world serial example and after writing parallel modifications to existing serial codes, accomplish the same task much quicker in parallel (given access to sufficient computational resources).

(more...)

Salinas Pueblo Missions are a short drive from Albuquerque:

All of the wedding photos have been posted here. The actual wedding starts on around page 10.

How were we able to do this? Well... we did our own photography. It's maybe not up to the standards of a multi-thousand dollar pro, but I think they turned our quite well, considering how frequently the groom had to dart out of a grouping to adjust the camera's settings. Even better than the large savings is the fact that we own all the high resolution (3504×2336) digital files, so we can make all the prints we want for pennies at Costco.

That said, if you want a large print, it's best to request it from me (with cash of course) so I can have it made from the highest quality source files, instead of with the somewhat lesser quality files that are posted here.

Enjoy.

You know those pictures that are made of of a bunch of smaller pictures? It turns out they're quite easy to make with the right software, and I'm thinking one of these things made with the right collection of personally important photos could make a very nice large scale print. I've some initial exploration with AndreaMosaic (free software) and come up with the following picture of Spenser made up of lots of different pictures from last year's RAGBRAI:

Original	Mosaic

Lot's things to experiment with in the future...

Update #1: Beef bites on my style
Update #2: I bite back