nokia's new terrorism planning guide

Quote from Rick_D

oh man i forgot sentura was a dane. my god it explains everythig.

no i just live here

he is actually an iranian fugitive, mapping in .txt format on his typewriter.

I did similar work in a job like that for about 2 years. You can order heightmap data down to 10cm/pixel resolution but it costs a crapload of money and you have to wait in a queue of all the other people who ordered heightmap data before you. I think we were working around the 1m/pixel range.

As for the sides of those building. I'm guessing they must have had someone come in and do those by hand. I can't imagine how a sattelite could possibly pick that up. Maybe from reconstructing multiple angles but then they would have issues with buildings blocking other buildings. There has to be some human involvement somewhere along the line.

Nah, this can be automated and has been proven before: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/1018 ... IEEE10.pdf Sattellites can take pictures at extremely steep degrees making it possible to see entire skyscraper sites from one point. buy a few sattelite pictures and you are good to go - combined with heightmaps it's probably even easier.

Quote from AlexM

As for the sides of those building. I'm guessing they must have had someone come in and do those by hand. I can't imagine how a satellite could possibly pick that up. Maybe from reconstructing multiple angles but then they would have issues with buildings blocking other buildings. There has to be some human involvement somewhere along the line.

Afaik they use airplane photos, many map-sites here offer to view places from a plane photo in addition to satellite photos, where they take shots from all sides after flying over the city multiple times in a grid pattern.

I guess it's something very similar to this. Apple bought this company (C3 Technologies) not too long ago.

It's basically what Pampers outlined in his post. A plane flies over taking high resolution photographs for textures at a few fixed angles. A separate camera system also collects a set at many more angles. The larger set is used to generate the 3D using parallax calculations which are then matched up with the other set of photo textures to create the map.

heightmap data is gathered from airplanes