How to create spatial index for Aerial Photos

[JessiecarEsguerra]

Hi Guys, I need help in building a spatial index of Aerial photos and have the Image Service project on the fly. Appreciate any ideas or inputs from anyone who has knowledge about this.

Thanks in advance.

- Jessiecar

[JessiecarEsguerra]

The georeference information is available as the metadata for all Aerial photos I have - both georeferenced & non-georeferenced images.

Here's a sample screenshot of an Aerial Photo that is not georeferenced.

Will try to use Phyton code in georeferencing by batch.

Thank you Xander.

[JessiecarEsguerra]

Another problem I have here, as you can see on the sample image, the GCPs is not the current extent of the Aerial Photo. It require cropping before I can proceed in georeferencing by batch using Python code.

Any other inputs related to this, I would appreciate.

Thanks everyone!

[XanderBakker]

Hate to tell you, but you are looking at a lot of manual labor... 

[NeilAyres]

That's a really old style aerial photo. Don't see many of them around these days. Xander is absolutely correct, there is no one click solution to get these geo-referenced easily.

But have you considered using more modern sources of aerial imagery. Or do these photos have some sort of historical interest? 

[JessiecarEsguerra]

You are right Neil, I need historical Aerial photos along with the recent ones. And I don't have problems with recent coz all of those are georeferenced.

That's what I'm trying to resolve Xander, finding a possible solution to not do a lot of manual work.

[JessiecarEsguerra]

Good news. Me and my team were able to find other resources like gdal & metalab to do cropping of aerial to have the GCPs as the extent of each Aerial photo.

From there, once the Aerial photos are cropped, we can georeferenced these images by batch using Python or other script.

Thanks everyone for all the inputs.

[XanderBakker]

Hi Jessiecar Esguerra , I don't want to ruin your day, but I don't think that it will be possible. Cropping the images in batch is no problem. What really is the hardest job is to find the control points and align the raster with these control points. See Fundamentals of georeferencing a raster dataset—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop 

How are you planning to use a python script to do that part of the job?

[JessiecarEsguerra]

HI Xander, I have the metadata for all my Aerial Photos which contains all the control points. I can use the image filename to link with the metadata and then assign those control points programmatically.

[XanderBakker]

That is good to know! In what format are the control points stored? And how are they defined (rows, cols and related coordinates)?

[JessiecarEsguerra]

For the control points I have two formats available in the metadata, the DMS & Decimal Degrees.