Odd Street View Find

Hi all,

I found this interesting anomaly while cruising street view in Vermont, US. I'm not saying aliens but... ALIENS!

www.google.com/maps/@44.9880663,-72.4967599,3a,89.9y,234.84h,128.3t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1shZe42eLv4-gGf6Vcxr7Uag!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

In all seriousness, my guess is this is likely an optical phenomena of kind or a glitch in the camera. For several miles in either direction on that road, at least one of those anomalies is visible overhead:

www.google.com/maps/@44.9979995,-72.5720265,3a,83.9y,322.09h,130.04t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sumZzqSMe1FLijuSVnnPnsA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Which makes me think it's simply the sun shining through the clouds in a strange way creating that shadow. However, the clouds were relatively dense at the time and other than some phenomenon of refraction, that wouldn't explain three of these "anomalies" showing up at once, since there aren't three suns (in which case we'd have a bigger problem to solve). That being said my only other thought is a camera glitch, which is plausible since the anomalies aren't always present on this stretch if you go frame by frame (they are there frequently though).

Any thoughts? I'm not in street view a whole lot so things like this may be a common occurrence.

Hi satorrotas

Welcome to Google Earth Community Forum. To me it looks like a camera glitch.

Drops of water on the camera lens

Hi, Satorrotas, and welcome,

These look like digital artifacts, the usual Google euphemism for what we laymen would call a glitch.  Not so much a camera glitch really, but more of a stitching glitch.  The problem arises from the fact that it's not just one camera that makes up the street view.  The street view camera system is like this:





The camera head takes multiple shots every second and each camera on that multi-camera head records its own little rectangular image.  These images are downloaded back at base and it's then the job of the image processors to "stitch" these essentially flat images into a sphere, correcting for parallax and lens distortion, as shown in the third diagram.  Stitching two photos together side-by-side is relatively easy and, by-and-large, SV makes a pretty good seamless job of it, along the grey areas shown in the third diagram.  It really does appear seamless. 

The problem gets worse, however, where the algorithm has to stitch the corner areas together where 3 images overlap, as in the black areas in the third diagram, and here it's not quite so seamless.  Mostly it doesn't matter when you're looking up, since the sky is pretty uniform and unfocussed and there are no hard sharp details to try to bring together, so it's quite easy for the algorithm just to blend the fuzzy edges together.  Occasionally light conditions, a stray reflection, of perhaps even a water drop will be enough to cause the algorithm to try to blend it in, causing the large smears you point out.

Once you've spotted these glitches, you'll find them all over the place in SV; unexplained smudges on walls or the sides of long vehicles beside the SV car.  Try "driving" along in SV, on almost any road with white lines down the sides and middle; look down and you'll see breaks, discontinuities, smears and smudges all over the place.  The fact that we seldom notice them says a lot for how much the algorithm gets it right(ish), most of the time!

There's a pretty good write-up on the imaging process here.

Hi satorrotas & welcome to the GEC!

Good spotting of an interesting SV photo-glitch phenomena!

My personal opinion is that this is a seeming error, caused by a water droplet (melted ice crystal) and it became conspicious by definite sun angles (light conditions).

***
As a kind of GE data-glitches -background nicely illustrated by Frank- I have moved this thread here to 'Data Discussions' sub-board.


Have a nice hang-out around GEC Forums! ( ;

Thanks for the input everyone! I have definitely noticed more of these splicing glitches since reading your replies. I'm starting to really appreciate the level of engineering that went into the SV effort!

The anomalies in the street view images are most likely caused by optical phenomena, possibly related to sunlight shining through clouds or occasional camera glitches.