Tag Archives: aerial photography

University of Montana: UM-Led Project Creates Mapping Tool Using Satellites, 1950s Photo Archive

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University of Montana: UM-Led Project Creates Mapping Tool Using Satellites, 1950s Photo Archive. “When the Cold War grew chillier around 1950, the U.S. military worried about a communist land invasion of the United States. So pilots were employed – many of them veterans of World War II – to photograph the entire country using aircraft…. Now the University of Montana and its partners have created a new tool, Landscape Explorer, which combines those 1950s photos with modern satellite imagery…. At present the tool covers the American West, from the Pacific Ocean to North Dakota and down to Texas.”

BBC: World War Two aerial photos opened to public for first time

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BBC: World War Two aerial photos opened to public for first time. “A collection of photographs taken during World War Two have been opened to the public for the first time. The aerial images were taken by the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) Photographic Reconnaissance units while stationed at bases across England in 1943 and 1944.”

Data Descriptor: A crowdsourced dataset of aerial images with annotated solar photovoltaic arrays and installation metadata

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Data Descriptor: A crowdsourced dataset of aerial images with annotated solar photovoltaic arrays and installation metadata . “Overhead imagery is increasingly being used to improve the knowledge of rooftop PV installations with machine learning models capable of automatically mapping these installations. However, these models cannot be reliably transferred from one region or imagery source to another without incurring a decrease in accuracy. To address this issue, known as distribution shift, and foster the development of PV array mapping pipelines, we propose a dataset containing aerial images, segmentation masks, and installation metadata (i.e., technical characteristics).”

BBC: Aerial photographer’s England collection goes online

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BBC: Aerial photographer’s England collection goes online. “Thousands of photographic negatives and prints, taken by a pioneering aerial photographer, are being made available to view for the first time. Harold Wingham, who hailed from the New Forest, took photos across south-west England between 1951 and 1963. Wingham used hand-held aerial reconnaissance cameras to produce images with excellent resolution.”

In pictures: Thousands of aerial images of England online for first time (BBC)

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BBC: In pictures: Thousands of aerial images of England online for first time. “Historic England has published more than 400,000 aerial photographs online for the first time, including hundreds of locations in the East. The pictures include historic landmarks and cropmarks showing hidden archaeology beneath the surface. Historic England hopes to add more than six million aerial images to its explorer tool in the coming years.”

The Guardian: Historic England to offer virtual flights over ancient landscapes

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The Guardian: Historic England to offer virtual flights over ancient landscapes. “The Aerial Archaeological Mapping Explorer contains thousands of sites identified on half a million aerial photographs covering more than half the country. Further archaeological remains have been identified using airborne laser scanning technology known as lidar (light, detection and ranging), which creates 3D images of the Earth’s surface.”

Digital Library of Georgia: Historical aerial photography indexes that chronicle changing land use in all of Georgia’s 159 counties from the 1930s to 1990s are now available freely online.

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Digital Library of Georgia: Historical aerial photography indexes that chronicle changing land use in all of Georgia’s 159 counties from the 1930s to 1990s are now available freely online.. “Along with our partners at the University of Georgia Map and Government Information Library (MAGIL), the Digital Library of Georgia has made the Georgia Aerial Photography Index Collection available … now providing online access to more than 1200 indexes produced by U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS).”

Bing Blogs: Did somebody say more Bird’s Eye imagery?

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Bing Blogs: Did somebody say more Bird’s Eye imagery?. “The Bing Maps team continues to release more stunning high-resolution oblique (45-degree angle) aerial Bird’s Eye imagery. This most recent wave of Bird’s Eye imagery that was released over the last several months represents over 80,000 square kilometers of new imagery spanning 100+ cities in the United States. In case you missed it, you can find details on previous Bird’s Eye imagery releases in our blog posts from July 2019 and November 2019. With over 300 cities in the United States with new Bird’s Eye imagery, the Bing Maps team will keep rolling out more Bird’s Eye imagery over the coming months and beyond.”

Sapiens: Spy Plane Photos Open Windows Into Ancient Worlds

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Sapiens: Spy Plane Photos Open Windows Into Ancient Worlds . “The U.S. government declassified many U-2 images in 1997, making them freely available to researchers and the public. But they remained unindexed and unscanned. There was no way to access the images digitally, nor could people know where geographically each roll of film was taken or highlight the particularly interesting frames. In the past four years, my archaeologist colleague Jason Ur at Harvard University and I (a landscape archaeologist) have worked to make this complex photo archive accessible to other researchers and to illustrate its importance for history and anthropology. The result is a resource that we hope many scholars can take advantage of, a window into ancient sites as well as historical Middle Eastern communities as they existed more than half a century ago.”

Google Blog: 1,000 of the most stunning landscapes in Google Earth

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Google Blog: 1,000 of the most stunning landscapes in Google Earth. “Earth View is a collection of thousands of the planet’s most beautiful landscapes, seen from space…. Today, we’re making our biggest update to Earth View by adding more than 1,000 new images to the collection, bringing the total to more than 2,500 striking landscapes.”

Layers of London: the latest (British Library)

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British Library: Layers of London: the latest. “Layers of London, a website home to more than 200 georeferenced maps of London and 1000s of crowdsourced histories, have now launched the latest pillar of their mission, the Layermaker, where anyone can log in to try their hand at georeferencing one (or one thousand) of these aerial images of London. Using the same platform as the British Library’s georeferencer, the user friendly tool makes it simple for anyone to contribute to this project.”

University of Maine: James W. Sewall Co. donates approximately 1 million aerial images to Raymond H. Fogler Library

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University of Maine: James W. Sewall Co. donates approximately 1 million aerial images to Raymond H. Fogler Library. “Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine has received a donation of over 3,000 rolls of film containing about 1 million aerial images from the James W. Sewall Co. in Old Town, Maine. The collection contains original aerial photography of Maine and New England captured by Sewall over the span of 65 years. The archive will offer researchers and the public a vast collection that details changes to Maine’s landscapes and cities over the past century.”

Government Technology: Subscription Service Offers Government High-Res Aerial Pics

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Government Technology: Subscription Service Offers Government High-Res Aerial Pics. “At a time when short-range drones and satellite birds-eye views are commonplace, one Colorado-based company, Vexcel Imaging, is putting its proprietary cameras on airplanes to capture ultra-high-resolution data of the United States for sale by subscription to state and local governments.”

Bing Blog: We’ve Released New Bird’s Eye Imagery!

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Bing Blogs: We’ve Released New Bird’s Eye Imagery! . “Bing Maps was one of the first mapping services on the web to offer oblique 45-degree angle aerial imagery, also known as Bird’s Eye. Bing Maps is still as committed as ever to offering fresh high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery. Over the last 12 months we’ve been busy releasing refreshed and expanded Bird’s Eye imagery and we want to make sure our customers and users are aware of the progress we’ve been making. In this effort, we’re excited to say we’ve released approximately 102,000 square kilometers of new Bird’s Eye imagery spanning 100+ cities in the United States over the last several months with more to come.”

Ars Technica: Declassified photos from U2 planes are helping archaeologists unlock the past

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Ars Technica: Declassified photos from U2 planes are helping archaeologists unlock the past. “During the 1950s and 1960s, US spy planes made regular flights across Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East, photographing the terrain to track military targets. A chunk of the Middle Eastern photographs were declassified in 1997, and now those airborne images are helping archaeologists track changing features in the landscape that in many cases are no longer visible today, according to a new paper published in Advances in Archaeological Practice.”