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January 22, 2007
Imagery Update: Google Earth Using Spot Image Satellite Photos in Europe
[UPDATE 2:30PM ET: Spot Image has released a press release about their multi-year agreement with Google to provide new imagery such as the new data described below.]
Google has updated imagery for Belgium, France, Portugal, and France to use CNES/Spot Image satellite imagery at 2.5 meter resolution imagery instead of the old Terrametrics/NASA 15 meter resolution base imagery. So, in other words the low resolution areas are 6X better resolution. Stefan Geens at OgleEarth got the details from Spot Image:
It covers France, Spain, Portugal and Belgium. It is made of imagery from our SPOT5 satellite : 2.5m in resolution. The images are selected from our existing catalog (most recent and cloudfree). They are then combined to make one single uniform image. To cover France, we need roughly 500 SPOT5 images which are of course taken at various date, sunlight, angles, etc...
Stefan also says some new high resolution DigitalGlobe strips are in Belgium. I am quickly researching to see if other areas have been updated in high resolution. Please drop a comment here if you find new imagery.
By the way, this is the first Spot Image satellite imagery in GE I've seen. It's interesting to see Google is expanding it's source of imagery data to another commercial satellite provider. A few days ago DigitalGlobe's newly acquired GlobeXplorer announced it was selling data to Microsoft. And now this happens. Probably just a coincidence, since I'm sure it took more than a few days to implement this imagery.
Posted by FrankTaylor at January 22, 2007 08:10 AM
Comments
Posted by: Stéphane at January 22, 2007 09:06 AM
do you have any plans in the near future to update maps in ireland? they are very poor at the moment.
Posted by: David Lenehan at January 22, 2007 09:29 AM
Luxemburg, Italy and Switzerland have got some of these spot images, too
Posted by: ge5 at January 22, 2007 09:45 AM
The high resolution strip of Brussels is a few months old.
At the moment there are no new high-resolution strips of Belgium. Only the low-resolution which is fantastic btw.
Posted by: Siemen at January 22, 2007 01:16 PM
All of Spain and Balearic Islands has been improved in the "base map" it means where no high resolution images were available before. They have not a vey good quality, you can't see things as cars but it is easy to see roads, houses, trees, ...(as far as I tried different places to check but not 100% of Spain, of course).Places in high resolution has still the same image provider (not this new one Spot image) so it has been used to improve paces with no-resolution.
Posted by: Juanma at January 22, 2007 02:37 PM
This new 2.5m SPOT imagery has 6x the linear resolution of the former 15m Landsat-derived data along each of two directions. Each single pixel of 15m imagery is replaced by 36 pixels of 2.5m data. The difference in resolved detail is great, as can easily be seen along the southeastern border of France.
Posted by: Michael Jones at January 22, 2007 06:49 PM
This is an amazing update for Portugal. :D
Altough "Spot" imagery has at least one year old, it seems updated because google hasn't been updating google maps for a while. And many changes must be made!
But i think that if "Spot" didn't take this pictures, no one else would.
5 stars for GE :)
Posted by: João Castro at January 22, 2007 07:28 PM
Not very good imagery I must say, but I hope we will get more and better before month is over
Posted by: akb at January 23, 2007 04:23 AM
Checked areas of Central Portugal that I know well and found the images disappointing in terms of quality, although it is an improvement over previous images
Posted by: Antonio Teixeira at January 26, 2007 03:17 AM
yes - Menorca (balearic island) has this new SPOT imagery. covers the south and west coast.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Menorca,+Spain&sll=50.616142,-2.474327&sspn=0.022656,0.078535&ie=UTF8&z=16&ll=39.982513,3.83616&spn=0.00684,0.019634&t=k&om=1
unfortunately , still no high res coverage for a large part of southern England.
Posted by: randomizer at January 26, 2007 10:24 AM
How often are the the maps updated? When can we expect to see the USA updated?
Posted by: John Penn at January 31, 2007 09:46 PM
Unfortunately, there is no high-res strips of Waterloo, Belgium. Anyone knows where I could find some???
Posted by: Daniel at February 5, 2007 03:00 PM
Ireland photos are very poor. A big disappointment for what is advertised.
Posted by: sean at April 16, 2007 11:25 AM
Is there a comprehensive guide anywhere to Google's planned coverage updates? Have struggled to find one with basic web searching. Specifically, I'm interested in York, UK - England's second most visited tourist city and still no hi-res images! Any help much appreciated - I plan to create my own maps for use in the tourism industry.
Posted by: Steve Bastable at May 30, 2007 02:46 PM
Why are massive parts of the west coast of the U.S.A. so blurred as to be of no value? If this is considered an improved update of the system, I'd rather have the earlier one back! In the future I recommend that if the update of an area has low resolution, keep the clearer earlier version until a better upgrade can be obtained. This is unfortunate, because Google Earth has been a truly enlightening experience.
Posted by: C.F. Richie at October 25, 2007 10:42 AM
Majority areas of Ireland still very poor resolution. What is the criteria for updating imagery i.e., how often and what priorities are in place?
Posted by: Paul MacCullagh at May 19, 2008 04:21 PM
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Brussels (Belgium) got new high resolution strips.
Here is the link:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Brussels,+Belgium&ie=UTF8&z=19&ll=50.841625,4.362404&spn=0.000857,0.002704&t=h&om=1