Grassroots Mapping is a series of participatory mapping projects involving communities in cartographic dispute. Seeking to invert the traditional power structure of cartography, the grassroots mappers used helium balloons and kites to loft their own “community satellites” made with inexpensive digital cameras.

Workshop at Fine Gigapixel Imaging conference at Carnegie Mellon

November 14th, 2010 by Jeffrey Warren

Update: I started to stitch the flight imagery together using the Cartagen Knitter — anyone who likes can help out by adjusting and uploading new images: cartagen.org/maps/gigapixel-cmu

We had a great time flying at the workshop I gave on Saturday (above photo courtesy of Andrew A. Wagner); Nathan Craig was there with some kites and I got to check out his very nice kite aerial photography kit. He uses the same electric cable winder I do!

The conference was centered around the GigaPan tool, and so I learned a lot about 3D reconstruction of a scene from image collections… I hope to duplicate some of their techniques to derive 3D terrain maps from our balloon photos!

Here is a link to the entire set of aerial images we shot: gigapixel-workshop.zip (1 Gb)

And here’s one of the aerial photos we shot:

2 Responses to “Workshop at Fine Gigapixel Imaging conference at Carnegie Mellon”

  1. Kimberly Says:

    Great workshop! I had such a great time. and we were excited that you were there. Thanks for sharing with everyone.

  2. Paul Heckbert Says:

    I uploaded some pictures of the launch at http://picasaweb.google.com/pheckbert/BalloonAerialPhotographyWithJeffreyWarren#

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