Vertical Aerial Photographs

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This page is the start of a store of possible sources for vertical aerial photographs, and covers some of the issues to deal with in using them.

Contents

Yahoo!

Main article Yahoo! Aerial Imagery

Yahoo! have given us special permission to use Yahoo! Aerial Imagery to create our maps. The imagery covers around 200 major world cities, and large portions of the US. The imagery is available from within Potlatch, and within JOSM via the YWMS plugin.

Georeferencing

  • Photos need to be matched to their lat/lon coords
    • Orthorectified(?)
  • How to serve them to the editors
This is easy as long as they are geo referenced (most aerial photos are) you can just put them in Mapserver and publish them to the online applet. Since osmedit uses the same interface you will be able to get images in that as well. JOSM has no support for such things. Erik Johansson 22:40, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
see here Raster data in Mapserver Erik Johansson 22:42, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
One problem is that the gov agency here in Sweden publishes their map in their own projection, this can be transformed with gdal_transform or perhaps on the fly with mapserver I don't know... Erik Johansson 22:44, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
Mapserver can reproject on the fly as long as the projection is defined in the epsg file that comes with PROJ. Is it RT 90 or SWEREF 99? --KristianThy 09:50, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Glossary

Oblique 
Oblique aerial photos are photos that are taken from the air but are not vertical. I assume these ones won't be much use for the image base.
Vertical 
Vertical (or near vertical) are what we need for the image base.

Possible sources

No copyright

http://www.gesource.ac.uk/worldguide/satellite.html

Open Aerial Mapping

Check their wiki at wiki.openaerialmap.org/OpenStreetMap

Organisation / Heritage / History

Sources that are governmental, historical or otherwise assumed not for profit.

The interface is easy, but you may be confused because there's no actual photos online - it's just a catalogue of the photos, which then have to be bought from the University. They started taking photos in 1947, so I assume some are out of copyright by now. They're also mostly of open countryside, and have a restricted field of view, as far as I can tell, so may not be much use anyway.

USGS

"Some distribution restrictions may apply. Questions regarding data availability are directed to Customer Services."

Costs money

Homebrew

Balloons

Kites

Model aircraft

Unmanned gliders

Microlights

Outside of UK

Australia

Africa

France

Brest métropole océane This is covered by the by-nc-sa creative commons license.

Not aerial photos but related

Where does Google maps / Yahoo! etc. get their map information from?

Sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Implementation :

  • The GIS (map) data used in Google Maps are provided by Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ, while the small patches of high-resolution satellite imagery are largely provided by DigitalGlobe and its QuickBird satellite, with some imagery also from government sources. The main global imagery base called NaturalVue was derived from Landsat 7 imagery by MDA Federal (formerly Earth Satellite Corporation). This global image base provide the essential foundation for the entire application. The underlying technology used in both Google and Yahoo! maps is available from [1].
Retrieved from "http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Vertical_Aerial_Photographs"
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