[Geotiff] Image processing project - getting started

[Justin Close]

Hello all.  I am new to the list and I am looking for some guidance and
pointers. 

I am a computer science student working on a project involving
manipulation of a large number of images.  The images are aerial shots
of the cities at night (taken from space, actually).  We are taking the
RAW camera images, saving to TIFF, using the date/time stamp of the
image to generally locate what/where the image is of, then manually
morphing the image to scale/rotate/position it accurately to reality. 
Reality in this case is Google Earth; the images will eventually be
served up as Google Earth layers.

The CS part of this is how to automate this process.  We wanted to embed
the lat/long information we got back into the image, and GeoTIFF seems
to be the perfect format for this.  Low and behold, it can also contain
morphing information too, it seems.  And there are all these nifty tools
out there that can do this manipulation, apparently.  But for me, who is
just starting out with it all, it seems a bit overwhelming; I don't know
where to start in order to find out what tools I should be using. 
Libgeotiff seems like it has a bunch of things that we (it is a team
project) should be using; we don't want to reinvent the wheel (not
completely anyway - a bit of learning by doing can be good, though).

So far the images have just been processed within GE itself, using its
Image overlay features.  But that is tedious and awkward.  First step is
perhaps a better manual tool that can achieve the same results (an image
that is rotated and scaled to fit GE accurately).  A next step is to try
and get those manual operations automated so that a large number of
images can be done quickly, without intervention. 

For the tagging (approximate lat/long) I was thinking of something to
read the TIFF tag data, interface with the database that will yield the
lat/long of the image, and then writing that back to the TIFF (now that
I know something about GeoTIFF, probably as a GeoTIFF now instead of
TIFF).  It looks like listgeo/geotifcp are the tools I would want to be
using for doing that. 

So, I am just asking for some guidance from folks who have used these
tools and could comment on what might work well for what I am looking
for.  If you want more details, let me know.

Thanks,
Justin



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 551 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.maptools.org/pipermail/geotiff/attachments/20101108/1463ac93/attachment.pgp