Mike McGill from Digital Globe gave a very interesting and germane presentation at MapAsia 2006. If you are not familiar with Digital Globe, they are the folks who are responsible for the Quickbird digital imaging satellite and the the soon to come Worldview satellite.
Mike described the dramatic increase in demand for high resolution digital imagery. He ascribed a lot of the demand to Google Maps’ support for the “hybrid” view, in which you can see both standard vector-based road/street maps and imagery. It seems people just love to be able to zoom down to see a digital image of their house.
High resolution implies much higher data volumes, and since imagery is available for most of the world we are talking about huge data volumes. At a recent conference it was suggested that we are currently collecting a terabyte of data per day, but other folks suggested that that may be the minimum. The bottom line is that the cost of data per square kilometer is decreasing while at the same time content is going up as resolution improves.
The other thing that is happening is that the resolution is getting so high that it will soon be impinging on individual privacy. We will soon need “privacy processing” to smudge out recognizable personal features like faces in high resolution imagery.
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