HKUST Professor Coaches High School Students on Creating Multi-image Panoramas of HKUST Campus

Over 50 senior high school elite students from 8 local and international schools have just participated in “The Making of the World’s Largest Digital Photo Workshop” organized by the School of Engineering of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

The Workshop was conducted by Prof Pedro Sander, Assistant Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, who made a global record-breaking achievement in December 2010 when he created the world’s largest digital photo <http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/58857/> depicting his hometown city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 

Demonstrating HKUST’s commitment to “Bring Technology to Society”, the Workshop transferred the School’s expertise and technologies to the young students through offering hands-on experience in photography and image stitching. The Workshop adopts the ‘train-the-trainer’ principle - the participating students are encouraged to pass on the knowledge and techniques they acquired to their fellow schoolmates, family members and friends. The Workshop is also one of the celebratory events for HKUST’s 20th anniversary.

The Workshop was held for two groups on Friday and Saturday. In the Workshop, Prof Sander first introduced how he created the 150-billion-pixel record-breaking photo, which was the result of stitching together 11,000 18-megapixel images and would take up the size of two football fields if printed out. Students were amazed with the power of the photo where even details in very far away locations could be shown clearly when zoomed in. Understanding the steps and instructions, students were then free to take their own set of photos on the HKUST’s Clear Water Bay campus. Students then worked on their own photos by using software to stitch the images. Through the process, they also acquired the technical knowledge of algorithms and concepts that the software uses to stitch the images. In the end, they created their own multi-image panoramas of the HKUST campus.

Prof Pedro Sander said, “I am delighted to share with young minds my experience of creating large panoramas. Through this workshop, I hope that students will see further evidence that working on engineering and computer technology is interesting, fun, useful, and also highly intertwined with our daily lives.”