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> "Amazingly, a vehicle had plainly [been] visible on a Google Earth satellite photo of the area since 2007, but apparently no-one had noticed it until 2019," a
by aazaa 7y ago
> "Amazingly, a vehicle had plainly [been] visible on a Google Earth satellite photo of the area since 2007, but apparently no-one had noticed it until 2019," according to the report.
This sounds like a job for machine learning. Are there any systematic efforts underway to use Google Earth to search for out-of-place objects?
- tanilama 7y agoI don't think Google would even attempt to do this, at least not in a high profile public fashion. Google is watching your backyard from above seems like a PR disaster to its already troubled image.
- journalctl 7y agoI imagine the amount of bodies of water with cars clearly visible from space but not shore is too small to make it worth investigating.
- paxys 7y agoFYI most of Google's "satellite view" images aren't actually taken from space but by airplanes.
- DogOnTheWeb 7y agoThat's actually an amazing fact I'd never heard before. I would love to read more about that operation.
- devb 7y agoI see them in my area on flightradar24, running very consistent grids like this one: https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pattern-Cover-1170x429.jpg https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/0...
- shantly 7y agoThat's where Microsoft's old TerraServer got their stuff, too, IIRC, which is the first place I remember seeing anything like that online. Wasn't that much worse than Google's version, really, considering how much earlier it was. I think my parents had an aerial photo of their land a few years before even TerraServer was came around, from some guy who'd flown over a big chunk of territory taking photos and then sold them to the land owners. I assume this was far from the only person doing that, all over the US. Pretty cool back then, when a clear shot from the air of the area you lived in wasn't something you could grab at a computer any time you wanted, or with a cheapish drone and a few spare minutes. And before everyone else could creep on your space in the same manner on a whim, for that matter.
- journalctl 7y agoNeat, I learned something today. I guess I just assumed it was all satellites.
- brailsafe 7y agoI don't know if "most" is totally accurate, but definitely the highest resolution ones and probably the most recent ones. Probably anything less than 1m. There is a significant discrepancy between the imagery viewable in 3D mode and the stuff that's only 2D, because Google simultaneously captures high resolution aerial photography and Lidar, particularly around cities. You can see vast differences in urban or rural landscape sometimes because the stuff you see in Google maps can be taken as far as years apart from the 3D aerial stuff. For example, you can see where the data source and rendering method change just outside the city of Winnipeg on the South end. Probably testable in many other cities simply by seitching between google maps and google earth.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoGood luck, it's very hard to even correctly label stuff that is kind of where you expect it. Check out how poorly the top five did in just finding large vehicles in a kaggle completion explicitly about annotating satellite images: https://www.kaggle.com/c/dstl-satellite-imagery-feature-detection/discussion/32197#latest-318740 https://www.kaggle.com/c/dstl-satellite-imagery-feature-dete...
- bpodgursky 7y agoI suspect you have no concept of how many derelict cars are scattered in woods/country/ponds/lawns across the midwest, south... an everywhere else. I get where you're coming from, but there will be (probably literally) a million abandoned cars for every car worth investigating.
- leni536 7y agoAnd of course for that you need some training data. https://imgur.com/3jYKQ6r https://imgur.com/3jYKQ6r
- snak 7y agoNice one, I laughed out loud.
- skinnymuch 7y agoWow that was very good! Thanks for that!