Imagery update

Everyone, check two new imagery layers, courtesy from DigitalGlobe!

Mixed bag of surprises: my area (Alor Setar) has some from 2012, but the rest is mainly from 2015-ish.

From the import mailing list,

For the time being, this tool can be accessed to know the year of the recorded imagery.

Unrelated, the AI-Assisted Road Tracing thing may be delayed until Facebook gets the thumbs up from Thailand’s OSM community. The updated imagery, hopefully, helps a lot to verify the AI output; but always remember that ideally, ground truth surveys is the best.

Finally got to see the new imagery for a few towns in Terengganu. Wonderful!

However, the usual problem will come for newly available imagery for cities where none was available before - imagery offset. Not everybody uses JOSM with that specific plugin, so that means those people will find that the roads (gps traces) are off by some distance from the imagery.

My proposal for this situation is for us to just trace from the imagery the way it is. After let’s say 90% of the roads in the area have been traced, only then somebody comes and align the whole imagery to available gps tracks. It would be a much easier single step to do…

And you all can notice Hulu Selangor Imagery also avaible now, That some user had been trace for Kuala Kubu Baru and Rasa.Maybe Klang Valley suburban area can be trace by using DG.

Bing imagery, however, is sourced from several partners (for example, Airbus). If they happened to update their imagery, I would say that (probably major) cities would get them first, if not the whole country. At least one can hear them first through their blog or Twitter account.

DigitalGlobe is going to update the Premium layer anyway sooner or later, but I value the diversity of having multiple imagery. Because from that way, new OSM users are aware that there are offsets - or how much the satellite layer deviates away from actual things in reality.

Bing imagery has minor offsets sometimes but DG ones is more noticeable. For example, DG Standard has 10, 10 (degrees?) offset south of Alor Setar. A little bit north, then it is around 0, 5.

(re)

Also, at least we could tell them to tick this and see how much roads are not in line (lari, tak centre) with GPS traces:

I usually do them manually, step by step, bit by bit. Ya lor, not many people yet in my focus area. Unlike in KL, Klang Valley or Penang - had headaches while aligning building in Penang. Also, building height is different, so I better do it one by one (if I have the time…).

P.S. The JOSM editor has a direct access (but must be activated first) to use the Strava heatmap, but iD and Potlatch has access using Custom imagery. Surprise, surprise, some places may not have uploaded GPS traces, but there may be tracks recorded by Strava users.

I’m seeing updates on the DigitalGlobe Premium layer. For some places, it used to be roughly the same as the low-res black and white Mapbox layer, but today, they are being replaced with high-res, coloured one.

Can’t really say whether they are the most recent ones, but IIRC at least the Premium layer is less cloudy than the Standard layer.

From Thailand’s forum:

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Mapbox Satellite also has updates, but they’re more or less like the DigitalGlobe Premium layer. Probably useful because from what I read, the Premium layer might get updated more often.

P.S. Why Penang seemed like didn’t get the love of updates? Strange. :roll_eyes:

What a pity, but we have DG to use too.

Seberang Perai has three updated imageries. Three! Bing from 2012/13, DigitalGlobe Standard and DigitalGlobe Premium (probably the latest, you might know better). George Town only has DigitalGlobe Premium only, and new OSM contributors are very likely to see the Bing layer first (that’s from 10 years ago). That makes me a little bit worried.

Yes SPT is more clearly now but SPS stiil blur.:rolleyes:I will try to cover Seberang Perai suburban area first in this year…

Another imagery layer is made available courtesy of ESRI.

DigitalGlobe Standard imagery has been updated near my place. Probably from late last year or early this year!

Yes, for now the Esri map is the clearest in the Seberang Perai. Now I will update for Bandar Perda one…
The Seremban Bandar Seri Sendayan also got a lot of changed…

I like both ESRI & DigitalGlobe, is it possible to change the default to other instead of Bing?

depends on your editor. In JOSM that is non issue, you just select which imagery you want to load as background.

Was thinking the same actually. So I have sent a message to the maintainer of the iD editor, a few months ago.

Apparently, it’s not possible to do so in the iD editor (yet). The most feasible way, is to get a source which is Malaysia-specific ( gahmen, can help aaa? :wink: :wink: ) – so that when iD editor is launched, it will be chosen as the default selection.

If you have a GitHub account, feel free to submit an issue there.

AkuAnakTimur, what is this https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4436507942. I think that road maybe not motorcycle lane but new roads to sunsuria

@kucai
I think we are talking iD by default. :stuck_out_tongue:

@AkuAnakTimur
Hmm… maybe you can ask in another way.
We don’t need to set ESRI by default only specific for Malaysia region, but could we have an option / preference in iD to set the default layer in each user account?

For example:
Gender: Male / Female
Layer: Bing, DG, ESRI and etc…

Every user can set default layer whatever they wanted, so there is no need to override whole Malaysia region.

That’s kind of neat. Not sure where to put it, maybe you could share your suggestion on the Editors forum? Or the mailing lists, if you fancy.

By the way, I was suggesting ESRI at that time because it seems like the DigitalGlobe layer has received seen no updates yet (as of September 2017). Now seeing some places has imageries even from July 2017, so… thanks DigitalGlobe for that.

I wouldn’t mind if you wanna ask the same question at other places.
I’m lack of time, sometimes.

Not sure if the sponsorship tied OSM to set Bing as the default layer but I think we all wish to have a choice as personal preference.