This could end up being quite a significant threat to Google Maps.
Unless google maps either hires them or makes their own solution.
Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap
41–50 of 50 posts
Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
The laws would have to change to allow you to fly these over populated areas. There's a reason the blog post is about flying over someone's private farmland. As a commercial company you can't even charge a farmer to fly over his land, the owner of the land has to do it himself.
The need for it isn't quite as much in populated areas either, at least for OSM's purposes. Bing's aerial imagery is fairly high-resolution and timely over cities (at least cities in the western world), and they allow use of it as a layer to trace OSM features from: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing
hi-res Bing not always available even in Europe (e. g. http://tiny.cc/p27t6w) and Siberia almost not covered.
Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The laws would have to change to allow you to fly these over populated areas. There's a reason the blog post is about flying over someone's private farmland. As a commercial company you can't even charge a farmer to fly over his land, the owner of the land has to do it himself.
Attach transient, disposable cameras with precise positioning to wide-ranging self-piloting lifeforms not subject to FAA approval, such as city pigeons.
they did that in ww1 :)
Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap
#44n00b question: can anything be done about the mosaicing in the images (look at the corrugated roof, the edge of the concrete etc)?
Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap
#45Folks have been doing this for years, and for cheaper, with balloons and kites. Check out the awesome work at publiclab.org, where they've mapped the gulf oil spill in 2010, pollution at the Gowanus canal, Occupy encampments. Stitch the photos with the OSS Ruby tools at mapknitter.org, publish them with a public domain license, and they'll actually be added to the google base map!
Buy a kit for http://store.publiclab.org/products/balloon-mapping-kit
Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The laws would have to change to allow you to fly these over populated areas. There's a reason the blog post is about flying over someone's private farmland. As a commercial company you can't even charge a farmer to fly over his land, the owner of the land has to do it himself.
The need for it isn't quite as much in populated areas either, at least for OSM's purposes. Bing's aerial imagery is fairly high-resolution and timely over cities (at least cities in the western world), and they allow use of it as a layer to trace OSM features from: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing
Push your local government to open up their data!
Eg North Rhine-Westphalia has published an "NRW-Atlas" which can be used to draw maps from it (no automatic imports, though), the data is really good in general. http://www.bezreg-koeln.nrw.de/brk_internet/organisation/abt... http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=22926 (german)
Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
45 minutes to capture the imagery. Also, 100 acres is 0.4 km^2. In the U.S., the big advantage over government imagery is going to be timeliness. I'm sure some people also have uses for the resolution.
I was going by this: "The eBee has a flight time of up to 45 minutes allowing to cover areas of up to 10sqkm in a single flight." -- http://www.sensefly.com/drones/ebee.html
I suppose it depends on the resolution required. Lower resolution allows you to fly higher, cover more area per picture and thus cover larger areas faster.
Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap
#48n00b question: can anything be done about the mosaicing in the images (look at the corrugated roof, the edge of the concrete etc)?
It's caused by the quick and dirty image scaling algorithm, it doesn't take enough samples per pixel. We used to see this sort of stuff in computer games before mipmaps were invented, which are smaller versions of the image pre-scaled using a fancy algorithm and then used in place of the larger image when it's smaller on the screen.
Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap
#49This could end up being quite a significant threat to Google Maps.
Unless google maps either hires them or makes their own solution.
I don't mean that their solution will necessarily be better than Google's, but it looks like it could produce top-down imagery that is about as good. Being OpenStreetMap, it will likely be liberally licensed. With the data freely available, the barriers to everyone creating Google Maps competitors will suddenly be minimal. Currently those barriers are very significant (data creation/licensing costs), so them being lowered so dramatically will be unfortunate for Google.
Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless google maps either hires them or makes their own solution.
I don't mean that their solution will necessarily be better than Google's, but it looks like it could produce top-down imagery that is about as good. Being OpenStreetMap, it will likely be liberally licensed. With the data freely available, the barriers to everyone creating Google Maps competitors will suddenly be minimal. Currently those barriers are very significant (data creation/licensing costs), so them being lo…
A significant amount of the data is freely available data produced by the U.S. government(s). The issue is processing it into something nice.
The level of coverage that can be done with that data can sort of be inferred from this post:
https://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-satellite/
(they basically processed landsat imagery to get large scale data for the entire globe, and free imagery of the US gets quite a bit finer scale)