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

[Eli Adam]

I've added one comment and link to Pat's excellent response.

On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 12:01 PM, Pat Tressel <ptressel at 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
>
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