[OSGeo-Discuss] Anyone openly georeferencing maps and pictures in time?

Fri Aug 1 10:52:34 PDT 2014

On 8/1/14 11:48 AM, Tim Lund wrote:
Thanks Bob.

Not sure what you mean by auto-populate - sounds as if humans would not be involved. I was thinking of an interface in which a user clicks a point on a photo to be geotagged and then a point on a map where the user knows the item in the photo is located.  As in QGIS georeferencing.  This could be different, though, since you might want to identify more than one point in the photo. Just having the locations and datestamps would be enough if users where just looking for relevant original images for a time and space; using projection information to warp them would be helpful to cross reference against other images for the person doing the cataloguing, or for making a map out of them, but not absolutely essential.  I'm wondering what a highly warped image would look like - the graininess would vary.  I've imagined defining what a photo or image is of by one key geolocation in it, (which would define the projection for the whole image) and possibly some more specified locations of interest to researchers, but from the projection, scale and image dimensions you could get define a warped rectangular area as being what the image is of - except beyond some horizon the quality would be too poor, and anyway, 3D objects would get in the way.
We already have the point ==> photo association in our system.  We have about 3 million street level photo's taken along our City streets complete with camera and poition/direction metadata for each photo.

I want to do the reverse of what you are talking about and apply our GIS layers to the photo as an overlay.  Simply put, I want to try and come up with a sudo projection (on the fly) of the photo and use that to apply other known datasets.  The GIS data would be the warped parts.

bobb

I was thinking more of desktop packages - what are those existing packages available in desktop form?  How would they compare with QGIS?  I don't have access to ArcGIS - would the user interface for that be easier?

On 1 August 2014 15:45, Basques, Bob (CI-StPaul) <bob.basques at ci.stpaul.mn.us<mailto:bob.basques at ci.stpaul.mn.us>> wrote:
On 8/1/14 9:18 AM, Tim Lund wrote:
Hi

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

Tim,

I've had a similar idea in mind for some number of year.  Just haven't had the right project com along to leverage the work against to accomplish it.

My interest is in general record keeping, and using/developing spatial (and time increments) lookup tools for the end user(s) to retrieve data based on a known location of interest.

I've seed some project that seem to get close, but the single biggest missing component (I think) is a good gneral use 3D viewing environment that's easy to auto-populate.  The next big hurdle is how to store the proper metadata for images so that their projection is stored correct and they can be viewed alongside of each other properly.

It's an interesting problem, but I believe it's possible to attain the capabilities you describe, and there are even some existing packages available in desktop form, etc.  I'm more interested in a Webbased aproach myself.

bobb

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