Is google doctoring sat images?

Helen wrote:
".:.:.:." @. wrote in message ...

I'm looking at the Liberty Statue with google's satellite images. Take a
look:


Yes, either they or their providers massage the images. I've seen at least
areas in my area of the UK with which I'm familiar on Google maps which are
obviously obscured or in some way sanitised.
Helen

Keeping in mind that such "obscurement" can occur because because of
atmospheric conditions as well, requiring even small areas to sometimes
be composites of several different images that aren't from exactly the
same angle/distance/perspective...


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..:.:.:. wrote:
I'm looking at the Liberty Statue with google's satellite images. Take a
look:
http://maps.google.com/?ll=40.68912,...2,0.003272&t=k
The statue is seen from behind, while the star shaped basement is seen
from front. How could that be?
Is it a poor cut and paste job from different pics?
Here's another view, showing that the vertical basement walls in front
of the statue couldn't be seen in a pic where you see the back of the
statue:
http://www.endex.com/gf/buildings/li...x/FtWd3672.jpg
Try viewing downtown Fort Worth. Very interesting effects. Here's why.
The images are mosaics. They are put together by a VERY sophisticated
program that stitches the photos together. The photos are taken at
different times, and from different angles, and after stitching
together, often have these interesting features, like seeing the south
side of one building, and the north side of another. It is usually not
obvious, but when it is, can be rather disorienting.

wrote:
On Thu, 16 Feb 2006 10:17:45 +0100, ".:.:.:." @. wrote:

I'm looking at the Liberty Statue with google's satellite
images. Take a look:
http://maps.google.com/?ll=40.68912,...2,0.003272&t=k
The statue is seen from behind, while the star shaped
basement is seen from front. How could that be?
Is it a poor cut and paste job from different pics?
Here's another view, showing that the vertical basement
walls in front of the statue couldn't be seen in a pic where
you see the back of the statue:
http://www.endex.com/gf/buildings/li...x/FtWd3672.jpg

Yes they doctor. On the news last week it was reported that Dick
Cheney"s house is obscured with this service.

Yes, take a look at the US capitol, and the White House. Both have the
roofs obscured, as do several of the adjacent buildings.

wrote:
The aerial images have to be transformed in such a way that they can be
layered with existing cartographic data. I'm not an expert in this. I
just use the resulting data.

My understanding is that the cameras they use in the airplanes that
take the photos take images at an angle so they don't have to fly over
literally every square inch of land to take the photos from directly
above. It also gives you a sense for how tall things are.

Because they're taken at an angle they have to be corrected for
perspective. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_correction for info
on perspective issues. If you don't correct the perspective of aerial
images, they're distorted. That means you can't layer them with other
geographic data, you can't measure distance on them, and parallel lines
will converge and look weird. Anyway, perspective correction isn't
perfect and stitching all those images together creates some weird
artifacts sometimes.

Google, at least in my area of the country, gets their detailed images
from local governments. Kind of a sticking point here, since gov'ts
pay a lot of money to take them and then google wants them for free.
That's part of the reason that a lot of the country still isn't
covered...aerial images of most urban places exist, but some
governments are very posessive of them. In parts of the country not
covered by those nice detailed orthophotos, you'll see the nasty
satellite photos.

Most of the photos are satellite pictures (from Keyhole). Resolution is
limited, and some aerial photos are available for specific areas with
much better resolution. Note the Microsoft site now has 'bird'seye view
' pictures for many places that allow amazing resolutions, and are quite
a lot more recent than the 3-5 year old satellite images.

Looking at my place, I don't see any people on the google images but its a
very busy place.
Maybe they have an automatic people-stamper tool. Kind of people-denoising.

"Jürgen Eidt" writes:

Looking at my place, I don't see any people on the google images but its a
very busy place.
Maybe they have an automatic people-stamper tool. Kind of people-denoising.

Do the pictures have high enough resolution that they would normally
show people? Around here (Southampton, UK) there are plenty of people
visible.

--
Måns Rullgård

If you go into North Korea you'll find notable blocks where "there is
no photo available" even though everything else has photos available at
that zoom... just a few notable "holes" for pretty obvious reasons.

*shrugs* It seems to make sense to me.