21 July 2009

Usefulness or pitfalls of image rectification

Image rectification is very useful for the various photos, scanned drawings, and the many other images available today with no spatial reference. In my job, I deal with this issue everyday. Someone will walk into my office with a picture, or old hard copy drawing and want me to incorporate other accurate GIS data on top of the image. Being able to rectify these images make these images useful again. If they were nothing but a picture, most of them would just end up stuffed in a drawer. Today we can rectify these old images for use not only in GIS but for historical preservation.

Pitfalls that come into play include poor resolution of images that make it hard for the user to be able to select distinguishable reference points. Also, images may be too warped to be able to rectify properly for use with other data.

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