WIP: Deleting clouds from Ortho

[efis007 885]

You still don't answer my question: "how does your code fix, repaint, correct, reconstruct a badly textured satellite tiles WITHOUT the intervention of a photoshop artist, and/or without the intervention of servers with artificial intelligence specialized in satellite tiles repair?"

Let's make a bet, I give you the 5800 defective tiles of the Himalaya Buthan scenery, and you recreate the 80 square mile scenery for me, repaired and without defects, using only your code, absolute no photoshop or similar.
If you can correct it better than me you will earn my admiration and that of all the "scenery retouching" artists in the world.

[mSparks 2,088]

22 minutes ago, efis007 said:

You still don't answer my question: "how does your code fix, repaint, correct, reconstruct a badly textured satellite tiles WITHOUT the intervention of a photoshop artist, and/or without the intervention of servers with artificial intelligence specialized in satellite tiles repair?"

I didn't, and won't, how it works is not open source.

26 minutes ago, efis007 said:

 I give you the 5800 defective tiles of the defective tiles of the Himalaya Buthan scenery

downloading now, takes a few to download and process, then I'll do a blitz around it in the F14.

38 minutes ago, efis007 said:

you will earn my admiration and that of all the "scenery retouching" artists in the world.

Not really looking for the smilz here, I want money, and personally don't think it's worth the time, but taking a spin round somewhere new is always a fun thing todo.

[efis007 885]

 

21 hours ago, mSparks said:

I didn't, and won't, how it works is not open source.

It's clear you're kidding me.
Do you know why you won't?
Because that code doesn't work and can do absolutely nothing to reconstruct a completely faulty satellite tiles/textures.
Only by working patiently with photoshop can the defective tiles/textures be repaired.

Moderators, can we close this ridiculous topic please?
Here not only are questions not answered, but we continue to support absurd fantasies that are an insult to the intelligence of the forum members.

[mSparks 2,088]

2 hours ago, efis007 said:

Because that code doesn't work and can do absolutely nothing to reconstruct a completely faulty satellite tiles/textures.

Some 3000 files/15Gb took about 2 hours to download and process, switched to google cos bing was mostly garbage, think it served me like lvl15 or smth, just not got time to fly it yet, anywhere in particular you want me to take it? I thought maybe get the 744 to autofly port international to VQBT while I busy with real life.

Also, snow probably wants a bug report, its only collecting in the valleys...

 

Edited April 9, 2023 by mSparks

[tonywob 4,770]

13 hours ago, efis007 said:

ecause that code doesn't work and can do absolutely nothing to reconstruct a completely faulty satellite tiles/textures.
Only by working patiently with photoshop can the defective tiles/textures be repaired.

When I was working at Orbx, we had to hire people to do this by hand, In fact, most of the GB aerial imagery I had to edit by hand to clean up, remove clouds, colour match, etc. I looked at various tech out there that claimed it could do it, but it really couldn't and was all vapourware or was harder work than just editing the original imagery. The UK imagery was horrendous to work with, and was like a patchwork field and was a huge amount of work to make it consistent. I tried various imagemagick scripts, trying to use Python image processing libraries etc with feature detection etc, and whilst sometimes it worked, e.g. if the cloud layer was very thin, it couldn't handle thick white clouds or cloud shadows.

One method I used in the USA that did work:

1) Download 2 different versions of the same imagery, e.g. The USA has various years you can use

2) For areas that are covered in clouds or dark shadows, it's possible to use a mask to blend from one area to other, even using the bright white cloud as a mask to do this. This was pretty effective.

3) For areas that suddenly change seasons/colours, use a fading alpha mask to blend between the two areas so that the change in colour is much less noticable to the user. 

For colour blending, you still would need two sources and perhaps low zoom-level satellite imagery for a colour palette, and I believe MS do this. However, even Microsoft with all their money and resources couldn't find an effective way to handle this problem, and had to resort to default textures.

Either way, with the recent explosion of AI tech, I don't think it'll be long before it's doable, but I doubt the tech would be made available to regular users like us.

[mSparks 2,088]

2 hours ago, tonywob said:

For colour blending, you still would need two sources

I'd say even more than two, in fact, my current thinking is photography is almost certainly not the way to go at all.

To many edge cases like

to get the necessary detail.

I suspect, the best results would come from taking databases like

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0282-4

constructing base imagery/autogen for an "uninhabited" earth, no trees, no buildings, no roads, no weather, no grass or greenery, etc, this can be reasonably low resolution (imagery is probably better perf but more disk space).

stack on top of that grass and greenery based on soil fertility and land use maps for seasons, maybe a smidge of AI on photography to get better resolution

Then stack everything else, roads, buildings, trees/hedgerows etc etc

I think the best sat photos have to offer is maybe acting like a level of detail for that, where distant scenery falls back to plain imagery, but thats a lot of disk space for a few more miles visibility and:

Of course, all that will still need testing by visiting the entire world, which is a whole project to itself.

Edited April 10, 2023 by mSparks

[efis007 885]

Can anyone help me understand what mSpark is posting, and what it has to do with the questions I've asked? 😶

[mSparks 2,088]

1 hour ago, efis007 said:

questions I've asked

What questions? you made demands, mostly around how its impossible to remove clouds in ortho, without editing, by hand

On 4/9/2023 at 12:07 AM, efis007 said:

5800 defective tiles of the Himalaya Buthan scenery

there you go, I couldn't get the 744 out of VQBT, so flew hand the F14. I don't see any clouds in there.

On 4/9/2023 at 12:07 AM, efis007 said:

Let's make a bet

What was that? the entire contents of your bank account and everything you earn from now until eternity.

Don't believe you are good for it, and also, I only make bets on large denomination financial instruments and innovative medicines.

Edited April 10, 2023 by mSparks

[jose88 50]

What source do you guys recommend for Europe? Specially Spain? I downloaded all Spain in ZL17 (ZL18 5km Airports) from Bing and really like it, bit it has some tiles inconsistent. 
 

Also, do you notice that Autoortho causes some stutters? I notice it

Edited April 10, 2023 by jose88

[efis007 885]

3 hours ago, mSparks said:

What questions?

I wrote it clearly: "how does your code fix, repaint, correct, reconstruct a badly textured satellite tiles without the intervention of a photoshop"?
And I also showed you what I mean by "badly textured satellite tiles".

Do you see the texture? See the flaws? See the wrong day-night colors that the satellite captured in different passes? Do you see spurious defects to erase?

Now that you've seen it, I repeat the question: how does your magic code completely correct that texture and transform it into this perfectly reconstructed texture, without artistic intervention with photoshop?

( I open a small parenthesis.
Your Buthan scenery has nothing to do with the FS9 Buthan scenery and the 5800 tiles of FS9 !!!
I was talking about FS9 !!! 😏
The tiles that I had to correct were not acquired with Ortho4xp and from Bing, they were acquired in another way and in another server, they are different from those of XP, they are not processable with Ortho4xp functions, so you wasted time for nothing.
Close the parenthesis )

You keep talking about "erase clouds", but I'm talking about something completely different, I'm not just talking about eliminating the clouds, but about rebuilding bad and heavily artifacted scenery, I've told you many times.

You confuse "erasure" with "reconstruction", they are two completely different things.
Erasing some spurious element from a texture are also capable of children.
Reconstructing a damaged texture instead is a difficult operation, it takes the artist's hand and a lot of talent.

Generally the easiest tiles to fix are those in desert areas where the random amount of dirt and rocks allows the photoshop tools to work well.
This tile is super easy to fix, even a novice can fix it.

... the defects are first identified and then selected ...

after which the "fill" tool of photoshop performs the repair.
Very easy on this tile.

 

But what if we find a tile like this, and we don't have any others available? How do we fix it? 😬

Let's use the previous trick?
Let's try it... selection on the defect... and then "fill" tool 🤔

It doesn't work. 😣 The tile is more damaged, the city is not real, the river is not real, the area is no longer real 🤦‍♂️

And it is at this point that the photo editing artist intervenes. Only he can reconstruct the scenery as real as possible. By hand, with photoshop, and a lot of patience.

Do you understand now what we are talking about?
Do you understand now what is the difference between playing "clear the clouds", and working on identification-repairing-rebuilding-recoloring heavily damaged textures?

Your code can't do all these miracles.
Here we are not at the Harry Potter festival where a small code is capable of performing magic, and where the impossible becomes possible.
Only a professional photoshop expert can make these incredible repairs.
And it's not magic.
It's skill.

If you're so good at magic code programming, why don't you go work for MSFS? 🙄
Did you know that their artificial intelligence (Azure Ai) fails many times to remove clouds and shadows from the satellite scenery?

You could make a lot of money with your code, you could ask any amount of money from Microsoft, and Microsoft would give it to you when you show them that your code works better than Azure AI and even better than a professional artist.
If your code really has the ability to automatically do "identify-repair-rebuild-recolor" of corrupted images you could revolutionize all existing digital photography repair techniques, everyone would hire you... Microsoft... the armed forces... the air force... even NASA for the reconstruction of the planetary maps... everyone would shower you with money and glory. 🤩💰👯‍♀️
Instead ?!
Instead you're here on the small Xplane forum playing "Guess my magic code". 🧙‍♂️

[mSparks 2,088]

2 hours ago, efis007 said:

Do you see spurious defects to erase?

did you actually read back on the thread you are posting in?

On 6/22/2021 at 10:31 PM, mSparks said:

Wasted a lot of time on that plan:- got nowhere

This one is "pure" image processing, taking a tile like

and spitting out

Took a while to rebuild my orthos, but so far looking good 

 

2 hours ago, efis007 said:

You keep talking about "erase clouds"

because that's the (2 years old) topic maybe?

Edited April 11, 2023 by mSparks

[tonywob 4,770]

15 hours ago, jose88 said:

What source do you guys recommend for Europe? Specially Spain? I downloaded all Spain in ZL17 (ZL18 5km Airports) from Bing and really like it, bit it has some tiles inconsistent. 

There is no single source for all of Europe, you need to mix and match.

For Spain, the European layer in Ortho4XP should pick the ign.es imagery and automatically switch to various other sources for other countries, which is actually really good. You'll of course get a visible change between countries, but overall it works pretty well

[Humpty 751]

Use both Bing / Google.

Some places Bing is better and some google.

I only sim over India / Aftrica .  

[MrBitstFlyer 3,882]

5 hours ago, tonywob said:

For Spain, the European layer in Ortho4XP

This is a term I haven't come across before.  I have manually mixed tiles from different providors, but what is this 'European Layer' that automatically picks a tile based on location?