The Bing Mobile group in Boulder, Colorado is constantly developing new areas to bring relevance to search through processing and interpreting imagery. When we last met, I had outlined the structure of our team and operations in Boulder, CO. This time around, I’d like to take some time to go a little more in depth on one of our products: Bird’s Eye imagery.
One of the challenges our site met in the previous year was the creation of a new map layer that is based on our Birds Eye imagery. Our Bird Eye imagery is extremely popular with end-users because its high resolution, oblique look-angle, and four look-directions provide them with great context for many spatial tasks like looking for a new house or planning a vacation. Unfortunately, a single oblique image covers only a few city blocks in area, which means one can’t “step back” and see a big picture, oblique view. So, to improve the user experience, we created a new stitched oblique concept. By stitching together the individual oblique images into a mosaic, we’ve given our users the ability to explore oblique imagery of large areas, from city-wide overviews down to a local subdivision. Since we have a single mosaic, panning and zooming is also continuous and smooth, making for a great user experience.
There were many challenges to pulling this off. First, the scale of the problem is enormous and involved tracking and managing tens of millions of individual image frames and several petabytes of data. Second, the source imagery has to be precisely registered to the correct ground location (typical industry techniques that work for aerial imagery don’t work as well for oblique imagery). Third, matching the color between source frames to give the mosaic a uniform appearance was problematic; imagery taken in different seasons, under different light and atmospheric conditions, make color balancing a challenge. However, over a two-year period, our team of engineers was able to overcome these technical challenges. They were able to turn a very labor-intensive, error-prone process into a mostly-automated system that is capable of producing thousands of square kilometers of stitched Bird’s Eye imagery every day.
In addition to working on exciting products like our Bird’s Eye imagery, we are about to move into a brand new state-of-the-art facility in downtown Boulder, CO, just footsteps away from the Pearl Street Mall. This space was designed with the Bing Mobile team in mind, leveraging common space throughout the building for collaboration and building technology solutions that not only allows us to work from anywhere but to view our imagery in optimal ways, capturing the Bing Mobile ethos in our design. As well, we are deploying this first Microsoft microsite facility in Longmont which will host highly efficient containerized compute modules for image processing; the Boulder team lead the industry in deploying containerized compute in Colorado in 2007.
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