NASA scientists have demonstrated FluidCam as a drone based solution to provide sharp, clear imagery of coral reefs from a drone's eye view.
Watch the video, write your own transcripts, summaries and criticisms in the comments. It's image processing, it's drone based, they're working toward making it satellite based. I want to know how well it deals with moving objects in the field of view (like fish), but now that the reefs are mostly dead or dying I guess there aren't that many fish on them to worry about anymore? There certainly weren't any fish in the pictures on the video.
Bonus points to the first comment that links to some hard science papers on the topic, the link above is just a NASA "gee isn't this cool" video.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 23 2018, @09:05PM
The good stuff in Google earth is collected from Cessnas and similar low flying aircraft, generally for tax collectors and wildlife surveys.
Used to be that you could look at a remote island that nobody cares about and see what the satellite resolution looked like, now it seems that all islands have had high resolution aerial imaging done.
If you look at a small town in Siberia like: https://goo.gl/maps/QxqsbEgXvMM2 [goo.gl] you can see the resolution switch from airplane to satellite when you get far enough downriver from the town.
🌻🌻 [google.com]