Area 51 at Google Maps vs Space Imaging

Friday, April 15th, 2005 at 9:27 pm

Someone passed me this blog entry about someone trying to use Google Maps to view Area 51. The quality ultimately sucks (as shown here) because Google Maps doesn’t have high resolution shots of this area.

Now, Space Imaging has high quality shots of the area using 1 meter imagery, but they aren’t in color. So, I whipped out Gimp, and rotated, skewed, and stretched the Google Map data so it would fit over the Space Imaging data to show the difference in resolution visually.

Click for full resolution versions.

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3 Responses to “Area 51 at Google Maps vs Space Imaging”

  1. 1 Steven Murdoch, on April 16th, 2005 at 9:17 am, said:

    Alternatively you can get the best of both worlds by combining the chroma channel of the Google image with the luminance channel of the Space Imaging one. I used your transformed versions to produce such an image and although there are artefacts where there are burned out highlights in the Google image, I think it looks pretty good.

    The human eye is less sensitive to the spatial resolution of colour than it is to brightness, you can get away with a significant reduction in resolution of the chroma channel and have an image still look OK. JPEG and television take advantage of this fact by applying chroma subsampling.

  2. 2 Patrick McFarland, on April 16th, 2005 at 5:01 pm, said:

    Wow, cool.

  3. 3 Confused, on June 22nd, 2008 at 7:08 pm, said:

    I feel like an idoit.
    I have no idea what you are talking about and im so confused.

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This entry was written on April 15th, 2005 at 9:27 pm. and was tagged Area 51, Google Maps, Space Imaging.

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