AstroPixel
Gigapixel Astronomical & Geospatial Imagery Platform
AstroPixel is a FastAPI + React platform for exploring NASA gigapixel imagery with buttery-smooth deep zoom, annotations, and secure user/admin workflows. It ingests GeoTIFF/PSB files, generates tile pyramids with GDAL, and serves them through an optimized viewer.
What Jayant Potdar Built & Owned
Independently conceptualized, architected, and built the complete product: designed the automated GDAL ingestion pipeline to produce Deep Zoom Image (DZI) tile pyramids, implemented the FastAPI asynchronous tile server, configured PostGIS for spatial metadata indexing, built the OpenSeadragon viewport renderer with persistent vector annotation layers, and packaged the entire platform with Docker Compose.
Key Technical Decisions:
- Automated GDAL tile pyramid generation cutting browser memory consumption from >2GB to under 45MB.
- Asynchronous FastAPI backend streaming only visible viewport tiles on-demand with sub-50ms latency.
- Custom vector annotation system supporting persistent coordinates pinned across continuous zoom levels.
- Role-based authentication protecting upload and dataset administration endpoints.
Core System Features & Capabilities:
- ✓Deep zoom functionality for gigapixel imagery (GeoTIFF and PSB).
- ✓Automated GDAL tile pyramid generation cutting browser memory consumption to <45MB.
- ✓Persistent vector annotation system pinned across continuous zoom levels.
- ✓Secure user authentication and role-based administrative workflows.
- ✓Cloudflare R2 integration for scalable cloud tile storage and fast global CDN delivery.
- ✓PostgreSQL and PostGIS database for persistent spatial metadata indexing.
Astronomical and satellite images span tens of thousands of pixels per side (often 2GB to 8GB uncompressed). Standard browser `<canvas>` or `<img>` elements choke, causing severe memory spikes, dropped frames, and tab crashes.
I built a processing pipeline using GDAL to generate multi-resolution tile pyramids. When a visitor inspects an image, the React frontend uses OpenSeadragon to request only the exact 256×256 px tiles required for the current viewport and zoom level. The FastAPI backend serves cached tiles with aggressive HTTP caching and gzip compression.
Detailed interface walkthrough, diagnostic panels, and feature screenshots for AstroPixel.
AstroPixel placed 3rd in the university-level Ideation Competition 3.0. It delivers 60fps smooth pan-and-zoom across multi-gigapixel datasets on ordinary laptops with no tab lag, proving that client-side spatial exploration can be accessible and fast.
Handling Gigabyte-Scale Images in the Browser: Tile Pyramids, GDAL, and OpenSeadragon
How AstroPixel renders multi-gigabyte astronomical rasters at 60fps without browser memory crashes.
Read the engineering note (7 min read)
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