Google boosting quality of Street View images [update]

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 03 November 2009 10:24

Your IT - Home IT

Google's Street View is getting a makeover, with new, higher-quality images being collected in major Australian cities.

Information gets stale - 'today's news is tomorrow's fish-and-chips wrapping' is the way one saying puts it. And a set of photos of a road are of historical interest rather than being immediately useful if they're not refreshed.

So Google has begun an update of its Street View coverage of Australia.

Beginning this month, the Google Street View cars are back on Australian roads, taking fresh pictures in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and parts of Tasmania.

Product manager Andrew Foster said "we'll be doing our best to cover as many of Australia's public roads as we can during this summer."

Not only will the images be newer, they will also be of higher quality. Foster pointed out that this will have the side effect of making Google's automatic face and numberplate blurring more accurate as those objects will be more easily recognised.

The timetable for displaying the new images on Street View is vague: "sometime within the next year," said Foster.

Will we see a fresh round of privacy complaints? Please read on.