> > Has anyone here used balloon mapping or these tools (or similar ones) who > can share experience, pitfalls, etc.? >
Public Labs is terrific. I think it shares a similar spirit to OSM in trying to demystify mapping, to put cartographic tools into the hands of ordinary people. Last year I tagged along on a weekend excursion to produce a high resolution aerial image of Dolores Park in San Francisco. I wrote that experience up on a blog post, also see below for a link to a Leaflet map of the image (albeit with no cartographic base map for context, sorry.) http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/photo/dolores-park-aerial-map.html http://visuallybs.com/maps/balloon/ Those images were taken from a height of 200 or 400 feet. At that height with ordinary cameras you get a very narrow field of view, good for photographing individual people but not so useful for tracing a road network. It's a great technology for taking specific, up-to-the-day images of particular points of interest. One specific tool worth looking into is MapKnitter, web-based software for compositing multiple aerial images, correcting perspective, stitching, etc. Details at URL below, the video is a good intro to how it works. http://mapknitter.org/ I wonder if there's a DIY drone community out there also playing with aerial imagery.
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