[OSM-talk] bike mapping setup idea

Stefan Holst mail at s-holst.de
Wed Apr 18 09:34:56 BST 2007


Hmm, I guess my other posting was discarded because of its size.
So, repost without tons of images attached.

On Sat, 2007-04-14 at 11:11 +0100, 80n wrote:
> Stefan
> This is an interesting plan.
> 
> There are purpose built helmet cameras (eg
> http://www.twenty20camera.com/helmetcamera.php) which might give
> better results than a web-cam, but the are expensive and where's the
> fun in buying rather than making ;)

Interesting. Does anyone have more sources for such cameras? Especially
in Germany?

> You might find that the web-cam images are too blurry to be able to
> read the street names, especially if they are at an angle and some
> distance away.  If you have to stop long enough to get a posed shot of
> each street sign it will slow you down significantly. 

You're right. I did some test, some images soon in wiki. In
CIF-resolution, German street name signs are only readable, if you're
standing directly in front of it. However other road signs, street size,
land use is recognizable. Even if the images are wrong-colored. ;)

Another problem I encountered is that web cams have problems with
changing light conditions since they don't have automatic exposure.
I would need to attach a filter in midday to get something else than a
bunch of white pixels.

Such a purpose-built helmet camera with slight telephoto however might
work fine...

> Several of us use a dictaphone to record street names.  This make it
> possible to cycle at full tilt and still get the name of every street.
> I use the dictacm approach (search for dictacam on the wiki), which
> works very well for me. 

I tried to use a digicam during cycling. Needs a bit of practice, but
it's okay for residential areas with not much traffic. Unfortunately, my
Canon PowerShot A85 can not used as dictacam. Street signs are however
easily readable.

Another idea may be attaching a cheap digicam to the helmet with remote
release. Does anyone have experience with small and cheap cams? Do they
record the time in exif-data etc?

> If you are prepared to cycle with a laptop then it might be worth
> investigating the use of a voice activated bluetooth headset to log to
> a sound file on the laptop.  Using this in addition to the web-cam
> might work quite well.

Sounds nice, I'll investigate this.

Thanks also to Frederik, Deelkar and Lars for all the hints.

I'll document ideas and progress on
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/User:Coomba and check back, if I
have concrete questions.

Best regards

Stefan






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