Changes to Google Maps Satellite Images
It used to be obvious in Google Maps where the boundaries of different satellite images were. Each image had different brightness, contrast, colour, etc which gave away the stitching.
I always wondered whether there were techniques to normalize that.
I guess there are: Today I noticed the satellite images are stitched together seamlessly.
I also noticed some level-of-detail differences between land and ocean and that is also done pretty seamlessly.
It actually makes navigating around the satellite view a little eerie.
Anyone know when the change was made?
UPDATE: Actually it depends on the zoom level. Compare this to this. And notice the image credits are different. Interestingly, my home town of Perth looks fully normalized at all scales, even though the image sources are still TerraMetrics for the large scale and DigitalGlobe/GeoEye for the small scale.
Comments (2)
David on July 5, 2008:
I'm a fan of angle splices, such as this one in downtown Seattle, where tall buildings across the street from one another appear to be obeying very different laws of gravity:
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=47.605621,-122.334325&spn=0.004246,0.011115&t=h&z=17
Last Modified: July 4, 2008
Author: James Tauber
Al on July 5, 2008:
I commented to a friend only this week that the stepping between the different zoom levels in terms of image quality and blending had improved, to a point where I thought it was pretty much seamless as well. I haven't seen any announcement of it anywhere just yet, so maybe it is fresh off the press?