Slashgeo

Low-Cost Aerial Imagery Acquisition

posted by Satri on Friday January 05, @05:31PM        Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the you-can-be-big-brother-now dept.

The Google Earth Blog links to an interesting new small unmanned remote control aerial vehicle with a digital camera used to capture images and then show the images in Google Earth. The short video clearly explains the power and simplicity of this new device. From the blog: "This technology could be a much less expensive way to acquire very-high-res data for certain situations - particularly for special events." Related, All Points Blog links to a story on GeoCam: "High altitude balloons can be deployed in a matter of hours and provide emergency remote sensing thereby enabling first responder's situational awareness and give adequate trajectories to rescuers."

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• A small note on GeoCam

  (Score:3, Informative)

  by IC (902) on Friday January 05, @07:08PM (#1173)

  This is very nice. In our balloon experiment (GeoCam) http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=446 [zdnet.com] we were checking how a $500 camera could produce imagery comparable to satellite imagery. http://sei.tamu.edu/geocam/Panoramas/panorama_22-2 3-50pct.htm [tamu.edu] (comparison is here: http://hasp-geocam.blogspot.com/2006/10/comparing- satellite-imagery-and-geocam.html [blogspot.com] ) It is pretty obvious that flying at a lower altitude will result in much better details. Our experiments also showed that we did not need GPS nor any IMU information to produce the maps we eventually obtained. This translates into lower weight which could also be the case for a UAV style aerial photography. Igor.