My experience is that disaster plans have not taken into account the rise
of consumer digital photography.
The assumption is that other than, broadcast TV, there is little
current photographic product available because
- Digital cameras are very expensive and require expensive equipment
to transmit them in from the field.
Typically, only broadcast TV will have the required equipment and infrastructure.
- The processing of film is the constraint limiting the use of film cameras:
The film must be physically transported to a functioning development lab
(commercial, government, or hobbyist),
processed and then the available copies transported the the information consumers
with highest priority for the product.
The emphasis placed on aerial photography seems to be more an artifact
of the problems of film-based photographs (above)
rather than any advantage of an aerial view.
My experience (many years ago) attempting to interpret aerial photography
leads me to be skeptical of their utility:
- The difference between a ground-based and aerial view of objections and
geographic features is so different that it requires
substantial concentration (effort) and time required
to make the correlations.
- High error rates even when I was intimately familiar with the area photographed.
Whenever practical, I tended to do correlation by elimination
("This must be X because it can't be Y or Z")
rather than from first principles.
Consumer Digital Photography
Residents have a vast number of digital cameras:
- Cell phones
- Point-and-shoot cameras
- Digital SLR
The problems using this source of imagery are
- Annotation (for retrieval):
- Context: Location, object photographed, date and time
- What the photo is entended to show (e.g., cracks in pier of bridge)
- ???
- Filtering:
- Many pictures of same problem: choose most descriptive
- Highest priority (eg big cracks over trivial cracks)
- Eliminate redundancy (reduce storage requirements)
- Transmission:
- Collector nodes (eg, someone with a laptop)
- Does not require computer network: can be put on CD, DVD, or thumb drive and physically carried to the imagery consumer
My intuition is that most people substantially over-estimate the level of perfection
needed in Annotation and Filtering.
You are getting decision-makers information that they wouldn't otherwise have:
it doesn't have to be the best photo, just a good-enough one.
If the one that comes up first is not good-enough, they can continue searching.
Although photos and video consume large amounts of storage space,
this does not seem to be a significant problem:
Disc space is very cheap and information brought in on CDs or DVDs can remain
on that off-line storage until needed.
Some people tend to underestimate the difficulty of annotation,
for example, fans of Wikinomics.
While the big photo and video sharing sites on the web
have shown impressive "self-organizing" capabilities,
the system of annotating the photos and videos has evolved over time.
People used both examplars (annotate your video based upon similar ones
you have viewed) and
feedback (if your video wasn't getting views, change the annotation).
In a disaster, there will be neither the time nor the interactivity
to power such an evolution.
Tasks/Questions:
- Downloading pictures from cell phones when the cellular network is down
or overloaded can be problematic.
There is a daunting variety of data cables and software required
by the various models (consumer digital cameras are much more standardized).
- What can be done to jump-start this process?
- High-end photographers (professional and hobbyist) are likely
to be actively shooting.
How to encourage them to make their product available?
- Role of photography stores before disaster: distribution of information,
staff as core group of photography buffs?
Future:
Cell phones will soon be required to contain GPS chips.
If pictures can be annotated with GPS info (in addition to the current time and date),
this provides a valuable information for the filtering and searching process.
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