Background
Remotely sensed data is being extensively used in various spheres of life ranging from town planning, transportation engineering, civil works, WATSAN applications, architectural engineering, landscaping and mineral exploration etc. for planning, designing, implementation and monitoring. Advancement of technology has given birth to an unlimited variety of remotely sensed spatial data with different characteristics available for use. Even focusing on satellite images and aerial photographs results in a wide range of data sets with different resolutions, quality, band combinations and coverage etc. The highest resolution of images available for civil use is 0.6 meters which is pretty good for most of the land use mapping, rural land classification, master planning and other town planning activities. But unfortunately most of the development practitioners and departments have no access to those images because they cost really high (20$ to 24$ per sq. kilometer for archive data) and takes around 3-4 weeks to deliver the images in Pakistan. In addition to this, the order for images can’t be placed for an area less than 25 sq.km.
We have developed some processes and combination of tools which provides the solution for all the above mentioned problems of coverage, time and cost.
Approach
Google earth is open source software for displaying satellite images round the globe which is free to use. All over the world people are developing applications based on Google Earth for meeting their specific objectives. A very recent emerging concept is to use Google earth as an Interactive GIS and we are also working under this umbrella. We are using raw aerial photographs from Google Earth Professional which are later on enhanced, mosaiced and geo-referred to develop a final product in a shorter time and cost.
Image Catalogue
We have the enhanced and geo- referenced aerial photographs for the following urban areas of Punjab, Pakistan:
Glimpses
Following are some glimpses from the developed aerial photographs of above mentioned cities:
