This is very cool! How feasible would it be to take a video instead of a photo, then using landmark detection and a stitching algorithm such as SIFT to cover a larger surveying area?
This is 5h of a single video from EWR to SFO by a former colleague. Turns out even a dumb trick like this still is enough to pick out a bunch of geographical features!
A better solution would be to use a program that does what most people think of when they hear the word photogrammetry these days, 3D reconstruction from multiple images, and then make an orthorectified image from that.
An areal photo that's orthrorectified with ground images as a secondary source would provide better normals. Of course we'd also use differential GNSS base-point targets to stitch the images together. It's difficult to get consistent color temps, exposure, etc with multiple ground images shot at various times throughout the day.
You can think of a video as a set of images taken from the same camera from different perspectives. So, you can assume as if they're different cameras (with the added bonus that the camera intrisincs remain the same), and apply "multi camera" techniques. I'm assuming you "move" the camera for parallax and what not.
With this, you can retrieve depth information by correlating the difference in position of easily identifiable points, and recreate the scene as a mesh.
This is basically the basis of photogrammetry as I know it. AI solutions may help at various stages to speed up the process too.
A big part of my day job is to develop an image processing pipeline for a satellite constellation.
Using SIFT or another keypoint detector is one of the ways to do georeferecing. You take a basemap and your image and match keypoints on both then calculate your transformation. There are a few things that make the problem harder than just use SIFT but it is a good starting point.
This is 5h of a single video from EWR to SFO by a former colleague. Turns out even a dumb trick like this still is enough to pick out a bunch of geographical features!