Google Solar Roof

Yeah I couldn't agree with Butchdeal earlier in the thread because he seemed to know... But my house and neighbors show Project Sunroof shading on the roof, clearly from trees, not other parts of the roof. You can clearly see the shadow outline of some tall trees between our house. And that was about a year ago it had shading...

Looking at my house and that school in 3D that I previously showed , google clearly has shockingly good data for them, including tree heights.

They have access to the same liDAR we do. Most of the google data for 95% of the US or more is NOT LiDAR based. it is stereo scopic imagery based. You can get good heights from this but not much detail and trees imaged during leaf off are not seen.
They are in competition with Apple which has started doing 3D city maps about 4 years ago. Catchup is a hard game for them as apple is using LiDAR and google wasn't. Google has since started acquiring LiDAR in some cities. The solar maps are based on LiDAR but are done leaf off so there will be shadows from SOME trees but not most deciduous trees. We have several patents on this http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2015/0339762.html

you can see what I mean about stereo imagery in this photo from google sunroof. It looks like the building are melting and there is no data for the section under the tree, just a hole.
Project_Sunroof.jpg

In this one you can see that google algorithems were confused about the height of the building where a tree overhangs the building:
Project_Sunroof2.jpg

in a few areas they are using LiDAR are not processing the same way that we do (or they would be breaking our patents). They use traditional DSM modeling, where we use first return / last return. First return being the highest LiDAR return (high in a tree even with leaf off) and last return is roof or ground.

Many sites are starting to use LiDAR based data but almost all are using DSM which is much simpler to handle, but just a slice of the data. The image I generated fro Rsilvers was based on LiDAR as well as corrected roof model.

They have access to the same liDAR we do. Most of the google data for 95% of the US or more is NOT LiDAR based. it is stereo scopic imagery based. You can get good heights from this but not much detail and trees imaged during leaf off are not seen.
They are in competition with Apple which has started doing 3D city maps about 4 years ago. Catchup is a hard game for them as apple is using LiDAR and google wasn't. Google has since started acquiring LiDAR in some cities. The solar maps are based on LiDAR but are done leaf off so there will be shadows from SOME trees but not most deciduous trees. We have several patents on this http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2015/0339762.html

you can see what I mean about stereo imagery in this photo from google sunroof. It looks like the building are melting and there is no data for the section under the tree, just a hole.
Project_Sunroof.jpg

and here you can see that google engine confused the roof height with tree height, where it overhangs the building...
Project_Sunroof2.jpg

in a few areas they are using LiDAR are not processing the same way that we do (or they would be breaking our patents). They use traditional DSM modeling, where we use first return / last return. First return being the highest LiDAR return (high in a tree even with leaf off) and last return is roof or ground.

Many sites are starting to use LiDAR based data but almost all are using DSM which is much simpler to handle, but just a slice of the data. The image I generated fro Rsilvers was based on LiDAR as well as corrected roof model.