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The amazing things about Google Earth


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AI facial recognition is too good, in two different ways!

Artificial intelligence based facial recognition is improving over time. However, it is a bit too good at recognising faces as two recent stories illustrate. The first problem is Google’s automatic facial recognition as used to blur faces in Street View imagery, tends to err on the over eager side and ends up blurring faces of statues, people in paintings, and now even a cow. Read more about it here (expect a lot of bovine puns).


A cow in Cambridge, England, has its face blurred for privacy reasons. See in Street View

The second story found here and here says that artificial intelligence based facial recognition can still identify faces fairly accurately even with face blurring. This would suggest that Google’s efforts to blur people’s faces in Street View may soon be thwarted and they will need to redo it all with a more secure method. The easiest reliable method is to completely cover faces with a square of solid colour. Another sightlier alternative would be to subtly warp faces in addition to blurring them so as to fool facial recognition algorithms. This should work until reliable body recognition becomes common place (yes that’s a real thing and probably works even better on cows than facial recognition does).

Komodo Dragons in Street View

Google has just released Street View imagery of Komodo Island, Indonesia, as well as significantly increasing the coverage for the rest of Indonesia. There are also a number of new underwater Street View locations in the region, which you can read more about on Google’s Lat Long blog.


Red: New Street View. Blue: Previously existing Street View.

The blue outlines are not showing correctly in Google Earth, but the Street View is there if you know where to look. The blue does show when you zoom out almost to the point where the ‘yellow man’ disappears. To zoom in and out while holding the ‘yellow man’ above the map, use the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ keys on the keyboard. Because of this issue, the imagery is best explored with Google Maps.


Some Komodo dragons relaxing at the beach. View in Google Maps.


The Street View camera was accompanied by guides with sticks to keep the dragons at bay. View in Google Maps.


This Javan deer is apparently not native to the island. View in Google Maps.

Image recognition and Google Earth

The last few years have seen major advances in computer artificial intelligence (AI). One area where AI is starting to show practical use is in imagery recognition. Google Earth and Street View imagery combined with image recognition has a wide range of possible applications. We have in the past had a look at Terrapattern, an experimental search engine for aerial and satellite imagery. They are adding new areas with time, so be sure to keep an eye on them.

We recently came across this story about a Caltech researcher that is helping the city of Los Angeles to count its trees with the help of a combination of Google Earth imagery and Street View. In this case they are trying to not only count individual trees but also identify the species.

The idea of using imagery for surveys of vegetation is of course far from new. Google Earth Engine, for example, is designed around such large scale analysis. When you wish to simply determine whether there is vegetation cover or possibly the overall health of the vegetation, a much better option than Google Earth imagery is to use false colour imagery – and satellites are typically designed with this in mind.

Another example of people using image recognition on Street View imagery is this one about identifying fire-hydrants and mentioned in that article is a project using Street View to study gentrification, which uses historical Street View to measure changes in buildings over time.

There is also this project, which uses Street View to geolocate an image. You could potentially take a photo with your mobile phone camera and the system could tell you where you were with accuracy similar to GPS. At present, this sort of thing is often done by crowd-sourcing rather than an automated system. The potential for automated systems has both potential benefits and serious privacy concerns.

Google itself applies some image recognition to Street View. The best known is identifying licence plates and faces, which are blurred for privacy reasons. However, it also reads house numbers and various street signs, and this information is used to improve Google Maps.


If Google were to add infrared to their Street View cameras, maybe it would make it easier to distinguish between faces of people who need privacy and faces of statues who need publicity.

Having infrared Street View has other uses and has been thought of already.

Street View Tour Maker by Steven Ho

Steven Ho, whose excellent work we have covered many times in the past, has recently produced a tool for creating Street View tours. The tool and details on how to use it can be found on his blog here. The instructions for how to use it are a little hard to follow as English is not Steven’s first language, but he provides a number of examples so if you wish to use the tool, it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out how to use it.

In addition to a number of samples produced with the tool provided in the above post, he has also used it to create a tour of Kumamoto Castle, Japan which was severely damaged in the Kumamoto Earthquakes in April, 2016. See part of that tour in the YouTube video below and read more about it on his blog.

The tours he has created can be played back in Google Earth, but due to a bug in Google Earth they do not always enter Street View automatically. If this happens he suggests pausing the tour and manually entering Street View by dropping the yellow man on the map before continuing.

Sheep View

Google Street View coverage has been increasing at a steady pace for the last few years, with new countries being added every few months. There are, however, still many places that do not have Street View and feel left out. One such place is the Faroe Islands, which are situated north of Scotland about halfway between Norway and Iceland. A group of Faroe Islanders decided to start a campaign #WeWantGoogleStreetView but rather than simply wait for Street View they started capturing their own Street View with the help of other residents of the Faroe Islands – the sheep. Read more about it here. Also see their website SheepView360 and the YouTube video below:

On the SheepView360 website there are some 360° YouTube videos where you can look around while watching the video or pause it and look around as if it is Street View. This makes us wonder whether such features will one day make it into Street View. Would 360° videos improve the Street View experience or not work that well?

We only managed to find one Sheep View image in Street View, but it is a new project, so we expect many more will follow.


See it in Street View

In some places, the reason Google has not collected Street View has to do with governments not allowing it for various reasons. Germany put a halt to Street View collection over privacy concerns (some parts of Germany do have Street View) and India has also so far refused to allow it on a large scale (some Street View exists) over security concerns. Submissions by individuals however do not face the same legal obstacles so there is nothing stopping you from adding to Street View in those countries.

Currently, user submitted photos do not work in Google Earth’s Street View so there is no way to see Sheep View in Google Earth. Hopefully Google is working on a fix for this.