I've added one comment and link to Pat's excellent response. On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 12:01 PM, Pat Tressel <ptres...@myuw.net> wrote: > 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 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/
Some of the Structure From Motion stuff might play a role in some of this. Here is a link on for one such project, http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~snavely/bundler/ Eli > > -- Pat > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@lists.osgeo.org > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
