HORIZONTAL POSITIONAL ACCURACY OF GOOGLE EARTH’S IMAGERY OVER RURAL AREAS: A STUDY CASE IN TAMAULIPAS, MEXICO

• Autor(a) principal: PAREDES-HERNÁNDEZ, CUTBERTO URIEL
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Outros Autores: SALINAS-CASTILLO, WILVER ENRIQUE, GUEVARA-CORTINA, FRANCISCO, MARTÍNEZ-BECERRA, XICOTÉNCATL
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Boletim de Ciências Geodésicas
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.ufpr.br/bcg/article/view/34875
• topic: Geociências; Geodésia; Fotogrametria

Due to the popularity of Google Earth (GE), users commonly assume that it is acredible and accurate source of information. Consequently, GE’s imagery isfrequently used in scientific and others projects. However, Google states that dataavailable in their geographic products are only approximations and, therefore, theiraccuracy is not officially documented. In this paper, the horizontal positionalaccuracy of GE’s imagery is assessed by means of comparing coordinates extractedfrom a rural cadastral database against coordinates extracted from well-defined andinferred check points in GE’s imagery. The results suggest that if a large number ofwell-defined points are extracted from areas of high resolution imagery, GE’simagery over rural areas meets the horizontal accuracy requirements of the ASPRSfor the production of “Class 1” 1:20,000 maps. Nonetheless, the results also showthat georegistration and large horizontal errors occur in GE’s imagery.Consequently, despite its overall horizontal positional accuracy, coordinatesextracted from GE’s imagery should be used with caution.