General Question

timtrueman's avatar

How accurate is the placement of satellite imagery on products like Google Earth?

Asked by timtrueman (5765points) September 14th, 2010

Let’s say you have a vehicle with accurate dead reckoning (within two inches using inertial navigation let’s say—using GPS for drift correction only, no DGPS in this case although feel free to discuss it in your answer) and you were trying to navigate with great accuracy to a place you haven’t been with your vehicle and must navigate to using a waypoint selected from Google Earth. Statistically speaking, how much can the imagery be off from reality? Are we talking inches, feet or meters? Is there jitter?

Are there any papers or discussions with solid sources as to the accuracy of the placement of images that you can point me to?

Please only answer if you have a solid source or have firsthand knowledge.

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1 Answer

toaster's avatar

Very good question and I’m a bit reluctant to answer with accuracy, but I’d say it is realistically very close to the pinpointed coordinates. These ridiculously detailed maps (bing and google maps my fav) just adds to the fact that these services are far from new and have been progressively refined.. Id say anywhere from inches to feet depending upon the maps relevance (situated around population centers, areas of interest, etc)

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