Assembling Voyager movies Options

[Brian Burns]

Hello,

I'm a bit new here - I recently started on a project which I thought would be fun, to assemble movies of all the Voyager flybys. Of course, with 70k+ images, it would have to be automated as much as possible, and the results would be fairly crude. But there's enough information to make some rough black and white and color movies with one segment per target, and eventually combine them all into one movie.

The main task is getting the images properly centered, since the cameras don't point right at the target - there are still some jitters at the moment, so it needs some more stabilization. But in any case, here are some slightly bumpy rides along with Voyager - these are from versions 0.3-0.34 -

Ariel (Uranus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeGgH34v8R4

Uranus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RLGadmvc40

Neptune
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlU2_NOgoew

Assembling a color movie is a matter of combining the images that seem to go together (since it's not explicit in the data) - this is a first attempt at that. There are frames that lack certain channels, so colors are pretty off at points - later it could borrow a nearby image when a channel is missing.

Neptune, colorized
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8O2BKqM0Qc

The goal is to generate the movies with as little manual annotation as possible - there are parts that need it though, like handling images with multiple targets, slowing down the movie at certain points, and turning off the centering at closest approach.

Anyway, just wanted to share what I've got so far - hopefully one day it will be able to make a nice, stable movie of all the flybys, with some appropriate music. Once the code is a little more stable I'll post the project on GitHub - it's written in Python with OpenCV, SciPy, and IMG2PNG.

-Brian

[Brian Burns]

Here is a rough draft for the Voyager 1 at Jupiter movie, including the moons, with a bit of music - composite channels are not aligned yet -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i38gzr6j5q4

I only put about 10-15% of the Jupiter cloud images in there - there are tons of them - at the end I'll probably make a complete version and a highlights version. Eventually could try to normalize the colors, or leave them as they are...

The idea was that this would be an open source movie, controlled through .csv files on GitHub, and it might work out that way, depending on how much work is involved in the editing. So far it's a fair bit of work, as I don't have good tools set up for it yet. It also depends on how well the automatic color and geometric alignment work - ideally the only editing would be controlling the framerates, what images to pause on, mosaic positionings, music timing, etc.

I'd like to publish the Jupiter movies before Juno sends back its cloud pictures - won't be able to get the mosaicing part done by then though.

Also open to suggestions for music - I'd like something more bassy for Jupiter - maybe piano should be more for Saturn...

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Anyway, the project is up here, if anyone is interested - it can also be used to just manage downloading and looking through the images. Not sure how well the install instructions will work - I think I covered everything though - it's on Windows with Python - it uses Bjorn's img2png for the image conversion -

https://github.com/bburns/PyVoyager

Anyone is welcome to help out if you want to do some image processing - the code isn't completely stable yet, but it's fairly close - parts might be broken. Some things still to do -

- Align composites - took a stab at this with ECC Maximization but results were varied - need to tune parameters or find other algorithm
- Denoising - will try to automate this - detect noise and black it out, then inpaint where possible
- Mosaicing/geometry - since the camera orientation is not known, will need to take a guess as to where to project the image onto the globe or 2d map, account for planet rotation/time, and try to fit all the puzzle pieces together with some kind of geometric image stitching. Then can take a snapshot of the globe from some viewing location/angle for a mosaic (won't be great).
- Colorization - use lowres color data to fill in the higher res bw images - will need geometry information from previous step
- Arrange movie to combine wide and narrow angle segments - would like to do away with the separate sections for each, if possible.
- Fix hot pixels interfering with brightness levels
- Stabilize the Jupiter rotation segment - align to previous and next images
- Do Voyager 2 at Jupiter - I still haven't looked at it yet...
- Output C kernel data!

I haven't tried any of this on the Saturn images yet - the rings will break things...