opensource aerial photography project (was Re: OM Camera - a newangle)

[Ian Stirling]

Steven Le Roux wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:33:56 +1200, "Robin Paulson" <robin.paulson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>On 19/09/2007, OJW <openmoko at blibbleblobble.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>>On Tuesday 18 September 2007 19:12, Ian Stirling wrote:
>>>
>>>>It must have wi-max, and be able to fly up to several kilometers, to
>>>>take pictures for use with the OM mapping system.
>>>
>>>Need to integrate with these guys...
>>>
>>>http://diydrones.com/
>>>
>>>[phone with GPS and camera being used to fly a model aircraft, and send
>>>georeferenced photos back over the network]
>>
>>interesting stuff
>>
>>this has got me thinking - openstreetmap is progressing as a nice
>>alternative to google maps and so on, but is there an open-source
>>equivalent for the photography part of google maps/earth? something

> 
> Yes there is, I beleive a friend shew me that in the osm editor (josm)

It's not really.
That's almost certainly the landsat/yahoo imagery plugin.

The problem is the data.

The imagery that would be gotten from a model aircraft style UAV is 
likely to be on the order of .1m/pixel.
One UAV flying at 30m/s mapping a 100m swath gets around a gigabyte of 
compressed data over an area of 10 square kilometers.

At this resolution, a small country - the netherlands, for example,
can be mapped in 4000 hours, yielding 4Tb of data.
For larger countries, this is much, much worse.

USA, for example is 10 million km^2 or so, and needs 1000Tb.

Ok - this is maybe $1M or so in drives and boxes to stick them in, which 
might be raised somehow.

The bandwidth bills is what will kill you.