Tim -- This is a project idea which seems obvious to me, and one which would so > obviously benefit from OSGeo involvement, that I feel someone on this list > will know very quickly if anyone is working on it in an open data way. It > comes from thinking about the warping which needs to be done to get from an > aerial photograph to a map, and extending the thought to what can be done > with a very oblique image - such as I might take standing on the ground. > Any photo, not just an aerial one, can be considered as a map just waiting > to be tagged with scale, projection, geolocation and date. The photo > doesn't have to be great quality - perfection is not needed. In fact, if > we allow some artistic licence, we could apply the same process to scans of > historic prints and paintings. > > And if we had a library of such geotagged images, researchers would be > able to specify an area and a time range, and search for images whose area > of coverage overlapped it taken during the given period. It would be of > antiquarian interest - there's an organisation I belong to called the London > Topographical Society <http://www.topsoc.org/front/index> which has > access to a mind-boggling number of maps, old photos and prints of London - > but also to academics in Geography and Town Planning departments. It would > also be of commercial interest to developers looking at the planning > context for new developments. And I think I've read somewhere of > commercial companies - Google, Facebook? - collecting various picture of > the same location, e.g. a holiday destination, and using the combined data > to produce images with unwanted obstructions eliminated. It has to be > possible, so is anyone working on developing an open source library of > images so tagged? > > Brief background on me; I'm a maths graduate, now approaching retirement, > and with interests not only in history, but also urban development, so a > project along these lines is something I'd love to get involved with. > Although I might dream to doing some coding, that's just not realistic > when my skills are more in MS Office applications and VBA. I've also been > looking at 'R' and QGIS, and I could get to the point of doing the tagging, > except for date stamping, but if there was anyone else further up the > learning curves for these, it would be good to link up. I also have a lot > of possible contacts with people who might be interested in such a project > as users, which would also make a difference. > > It seems like such a nice project, so hoping someone can help >
This is a popular area, since it relates to side-scan sonar, side-looking aerial radar, and cameras suspended from drones, which, even if they're intended to be pointing down, rarely are. (It also seems to be somewhat a solved problem, just not open-source -- as you may guess, this has military use.) It also comes up in autonomous vehicles, since one wants to infer (for instance) distance of objects from imagery. For both this and georeferencing, sequences of (partly) overlapping images -- video -- are very useful. In fact, this subject is under current discussion over on the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team mailing list, with the revival of OpenAerialMap. I'd recommend joining up with the folks over there. I'm CCing some folks (Stephen Mather, Kate Chapman, Michael Patrick) who are involved with OpenAerialMap and / or OpenStreetMap and georeferencing in general. Some references re. georeferencing imagery (specifically for drones) and related (Michael probably has more): http://opendronemap.github.io/odm/ http://dronemapper.com/ (commercial image processing service) http://flightriot.com/ http://ccwu.me/vsfm/ -- Pat
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