Comments on: Attention, Google Maps fans: Here come GeoEye photos

The first image has arrived from the GeoEye-1 satellite, which will supply new high-resolution imagery to Google Maps and other customers.

[timl2k8]

wow. this has the same resolution of the aerial photography they currently use in metropolitan areas. I wonder if this means will eventually have this kind of resolution for rural areas as well, or for the entire map for that matter. Amazing. One drawback to the aerial photography is that buildings are often skewed since it is taken from a camera so close to the surface. I assume the satellite camera will always be pointing straight down...

[k2dave]

Is straight down view a drawback or is the angled one?

MS uses a high res 'birds eye view', which appears to be taken by aircraft. One advantage of the birds eye view is that you can easily orientate yourself because you not only see from the top, but the sides also, so what you see from ground level can be matched. Also you can get a idea of the height of the structure, which is not possible in a straight down view. Also usually MS provides 4 angles to view, so you can see all sides of a building/object.

[Pete Bardo]

What's it mean when you say 50-centimeter resolution? I see lines on the football field and the tennis court. Does that mean the lines are 1.5 feet wide?

Regardless, it's an amazing image. Can't wait to see GeoEye-2 images.

[sledghamme]

Does anyone know when this will start being uploaded to google maps since the current images there of this town are there old pictures.

[jtbuzz]

Microsoft's maps.live.com already has this feature.

[Shankland]

All the mapping sites have high-resolution imagery for some areas. None of them have it for all areas. Google contracted with GeoEye to get more imagery--and presumably more up-to-date imagery as well.

[proudmonkey]

Hmm... I know there is some increase in quality can we see a comparative shot of the current one compared to the new one?

[flared0ne]

According to Wikipedia: "In geographic information systems (GISs), Spatial Resolution commonly refers to the Ground Sample Distance (GSD) of an image. Or in other words, how much of the earth's surface a single pixel covers."

Just for purposes of "gut feel", lets convert from 0.41 meters to 16.14 inches, then round off that ~1/8 inch. Because a resolution of 16 inches means that any given pixel is going to be the averaged value of all reflected light coming from that ~270 square inches of surface, an image feature (like the line on a football field) which is a white stripe six inches wide against a dark green turf background is going to yield a 16"x16" pixel which is 64% dark green and 36% white -- very similar to a grey stripe 12 inches wide against the same background.

So that six-inch wide strip across the background turf is going to LOOK like something just less than sixteen-inches wide (as your eyes interpolate along a 2-dimensional swath of pixels) and only about 36% as white as the middle of a 30-inch-wide white stripe would be...

You can tell SOMEthing is there, you just can't distinguish precisely where its edges are or what color it actually is. Notice the pixelation collapse of the 10-yard markers on the football field -- you can't really distinguish the numbers, except somewhat vaguely from positional cues. And the traffic direction arrows on the parking lot surfaces -- you know it's an arrow, but more from gradient ratios than actually being able to see the shape of the arrowhead.

We are still some distance from the military resolution portrayed in various movie scenarios (e.g. http://www.c4i.org/spysats.html, re "Patriot Games", with Harrison Ford), of being able to look down in real time at terrorist training camps and view thermal profiles of individual people well enough to tell which direction they are facing. Or reading license plate numbers. Or watching sunbathers.

Be thankful.

[LLElliss]

This should help in archeology

[jchathwy]

If the image you show represents Google's actual pixel resolution for the Kutztown Campus, Google Earth already has places that exhibit much higher resolution. Compare at high magnification the Kutztown tennis courts with those shown in Paris at 48°49'46.91"N 2°16'07.34"E. The images of cars and people in the Paris images also show notably better resolution.

[dqkennard]

Yes, there are similar resolution shots (or better) of some areas in most mapping sites. Those are aerial photography, which means coverage is expensive and slow to expand. These are satellite photos of noticably higher resolution than previously available. As the article says, that satellite is travelling at 4.5 miles per second relative to the ground. It's presumably taking images continuously. I would expect that eventually (probably not very long) there would be coverage of most of the land-area of the earth (minus a few classified areas, and probably a few excluded by privacy requests/lawsuits of some sort). I don't know what the domestic or international law is on what they can and cannot photograph -- or make available.