Google gives 700 trillion-pixels makeover to Maps and Earth apps

NEW DELHI: Finding Google Maps, Google Earth apps prettier? Yes, the search giant Google has been working on it and has rolled out sharper and more seamless imagery to the tools.

The update includes photos from Landsat 8 designed by NASA and the United States Geological Survey and "new processing techniques for sharper images than ever before."

Google claims that it is mining data from nearly a petabyte of Landsat imagery. To put that in perspective, 700 trillion pixels is 7,000 times more pixels than the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, or 70 times more pixels than the estimated number of galaxies in the Universe.

"To produce this new imagery, we used the same publicly available Earth Engine APIs that scientists use to do things like track global tree cover, loss, and gain; predict Malaria outbreaks; and map global surface water over a 30 year period," wrote the company in a blogpost.


According to Google, the satellite images are often cloudy, but not always over the same place, so the company looked at millions of images and took the clearest pixels to stitch together a cloud-free and seamless image.

The blog further reveals that the company in its previous mosaic used imagery from Landsat 7 only, which at the time was the best imagery of its kind. Unfortunately, Landsat 7 images captured after 2003 were affected by a hardware failure, resulting in large diagonal gaps of missing data

Recently, the Home Ministry has rejected Google’s Street View plan, under which the company plans to cover India via its SteetView service.

Citing security concerns the ministry said that enabling such image capture techniques led to the planning of 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The officials further said that the rejection came after a detailed analysis by the defence and security agencies. The security agencies believe that allowing Google to cover India may compromise the security of the country.