The global network of outdoor webcams: properties and applications

Authors:
Nathan Jacobs;Walker Burgin;Nick Fridrich;Austin Abrams;Kylia Miskell;Bobby H. Braswell;Andrew D. Richardson;Robert Pless
Affiliations:
Washington University, St. Louis, MO;Washington University, St. Louis, MO;Washington University, St. Louis, MO;Washington University, St. Louis, MO;Washington University, St. Louis, MO;Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc., Lexington, MA;Harvard University, Cambridge, MA;Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Venue:
Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
Year:
2009

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Abstract

There are thousands of outdoor webcams which offer live images freely over the Internet. We report on methods for discovering and organizing this already existing and massively distributed global sensor, and argue that it provides an interesting alternative to satellite imagery for global-scale remote sensing applications. In particular, we characterize the live imaging capabilities that are freely available as of the summer of 2009 in terms of the spatial distribution of the cameras, their update rate, and characteristics of the scene in view. We offer algorithms that exploit the fact that webcams are typically static to simplify the tasks of inferring relevant environmental and weather variables directly from image data. Finally, we show that organizing and exploiting the large, ad-hoc, set of cameras attached to the web can dramatically increase the data available for studying particular problems in phenology.