Excellent write up and an enjoyable read! Reminds me of the “good old times” where posts on HN were written by humans and with a specific writing style like yours.
You could’ve used a little bit more of geoguessing to narrow down results, or do a brute force visual check on the last hundred or so ;-)
yea, thanks :D , I used a tiny idea from geoguessing, that I banded the search on islands only in latitude between -30 to +30 deg. based on the sky and the tropical vibes in the img , and it worked !
For drones and missiles, this technique is known as Terrain Contour Matching. If terrain contour are measured optically, navigation is independent of RF jamming, unlike GNSS.
OpenStreetMap data really is a godsend for such OSINT purposes.
Works much better in populated areas too, with more features like roads, shops, electric lines that can be used to search.
yea, good observation, my guess is its the data more than the filter. OSM coastline polygons are generalized to different degrees depending on who traced them and from what imagery, so the fine shape detail a halo check would key on often is not in the geometry at all.
I observed that at the end, didnt push on it further though. It already passed and I was super exhausted
they literally memorize and get patterns of every possible road, place, map of any area (scanned by google earth), getting exact coordinated from single image, and play competitions and world cup based on that
they do really nice videos about finding places in old photos people ask for
haha, thanks :D
I was hesitant to whether write it or not,
but I really really despise llm generated posts and blogs
and im glad someone appreciated it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
I observed that at the end, didnt push on it further though. It already passed and I was super exhausted
they literally memorize and get patterns of every possible road, place, map of any area (scanned by google earth), getting exact coordinated from single image, and play competitions and world cup based on that
they do really nice videos about finding places in old photos people ask for
A million upvotes from me.