The New KML features in Google Earth 6.1

In the recently released Google Earth 6.1 we added two new features that will help you annotate line data and improve KML Tours that include Street View mode. As a part of Google’s ongoing commitment to innovation within the standard, these were added to the gx: namespace using the official extension mechanism for OGC KML.

 

Line labels

When Earth 6.0 launched last November we introduced line styling options to create more realistic roads that have a physical width, outer coloring, and text labels. Now with Google Earth 6.1 you can also add simple text labels at the midpoint of regular (screen <width>) lines by using the new <gx:labelVisibility> tag in <LineStyle>.

Caption: Labeled line between SFO and LAX airports.

Download the KML.

 

Note: To preserve the current, unlabeled appearance of regular lines in existing KML files, we’ve turned off all line labels by default in Google Earth 6.1. Because labels for physical width lines were turned on by default in Earth 6.0, you will now need to explicitly enable in your LineStyles to display them in Earth 6.1+.

 

Better Street View experience in Tours

Last November we also introduced <gx:ViewerOptions> in Earth 6.0 so that KML Tours can activate the historical imagery, sunlight and Street View modes, allowing you to tell even cooler stories.

Street View mode uses a different field of view (FOV) than the regular navigation mode to provide users with a better experience. However, until now this special FOV was not captured while creating Tours in Google Earth. This meant that tour playback couldn’t faithfully reproduce the Street View experience as originally recorded.

To address this issue in Google Earth 6.1 we added the <gx:horizFov> tag to <Camera> and <LookAt>. These values are captured automatically while recording tours in Earth 6.1 but you can also add them directly to your KML.

 

Caption: Here’s an example of using to create the classic dolly zoom effect, invented by cameraman Irmin Roberts and used in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. Download the KML here.

Note: Although Cameras and LookAts can also be used to provide a default view for your placemarks, please note that in Google Earth 6.1 custom FOV values are only respected within the <gx:FlyTo> tags in tours.

 

The SqlGeometry with Microsoft SQL Server

I came across a curious error earlier today when attempting to use a SqlDataReader to read a column of geometry data from a SQL Server table:

System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.SqlGeometry’ to type ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.SqlGeometry’

SqlGeometry to SqlGeometry… you’d think that would be a pretty easy cast, wouldn’t you? It turns out that this is a problem caused by a conflict between the spatial libraries used in SQL Server Denali compared to that in 2008/R2, and you’ll get this error depending on which version of Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.dll you use, and how you try to access geometry or geography columns from a datareader:

[php]
while (dataReader.Read())
{
// This works in SQL Server 2008/R2, but errors with Denali
SqlGeometry g = (SqlGeometry)dataReader.GetValue(0);

// This works in SQL Server 2008/R2, but errors with Denali
SqlGeometry g = (SqlGeometry)dataReader["GeomCol"];

// This works in Denali, but not in SQL Server 2008/R2
SqlGeometry g = SqlGeometry.Deserialize(reader.GetSqlBytes(0));

// This works in Sql Server 2008/R2/Denali
SqlGeometry g = new SqlGeometry();
g.Read(new BinaryReader(reader.GetSqlBytes(0).Stream));
}
[/php]

After a bit of digging around, it appears that using GetValue or square brackets notation [] to access a geometry/geography field in a SqlDataReader is hard-coded to load the 10.0 (SQL Server 2008) version of the Microsoft.SqlServer.Types library.

If you’ve got side-by-side installations of both SQL Server 2008/R2 and Denali (as I have), and try to reference the 11.0 (Denali) version of Microsoft.SqlServer.Types, you’ll therefore get an assembly mismatch when both versions of the library are loaded, which causes the slightly unhelpful error listed at the top of this post. Even if you’ve only got Denali installed, your code may still try to reference a (non-existent) 2008/R2 version of the Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.dll library, so you’ll get a different error instead:

Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Types, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91′ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

The simplest way to resolve these errors is by changing the way you reference any geography/geometry (and, I imagine, hierarchyid) columns from your DataReader, as in the code example above. Alternatively, you can set up an assembly redirection in the application configuration file as explained here (about halfway down), which will allow you to correctly target the Denali version.

As per the What’s new in SQL Server Denali whitepaper, “… side-by-side installations of SQL Server Code-Named “Denali” CTP1 and CTP3 are not supported with existing SQL Server 2008 installations …”, so perhaps I only have myself to blame for this. Interestingly though, the person who raised this MS Connect issue, says that they have experienced exactly the same problem on a clean install of Denali CTP3. The response from Microsoft suggests that this may be due to older versions of the library being packaged with Visual Studio 2010, and also confirms that the problem will not be resolved prior to RTM of SQL Server Denali.

Strangely, I encountered another curious error a few months ago concerning version conflicts of Microsoft.SqlServer.Types. My CTP3 Management Studio Spatial Results tab does not plot curved geometries (selecting a CircularString or the result of BufferWithCurves etc. just produces a blank pane). I had originally assumed that, since this was only a CTP release, this feature had simply not been added yet. It turns out that curved geometries are supported in SSMS CTP3 Spatial Results tab but, if you have side-by-side SQL Server 2008 and Denali, this can corrupt this feature. I guess the reason is similar – that SSMS is somehow attempting to load the SQL Server 2008/R2 version of Microsoft.SqlServer.Types, which, of course, doesn’t support curved geometries.

Deleting Blank Tiles

 

Creating raster tilesets almost invariably leads to the creation of some blank tiles – covering those areas of space where no features were present in the underlying dataset. Depending on the image format you use for your tiles, and the method you used to create them, those “blank” tiles may be pure white, or some other solid colour, or they may have an alpha channel set to be fully transparent.

Here’s an example of a directory of tiles I just created. In this particular z/x directory, more than half the tiles are blank. Windows explorer shows them as black but that’s because it doesn’t process the alpha channel correctly. They are actually all 256px x 256px PNG images, filled with ARGB (0, 0, 0, 0):

image

What to do with these tiles? Well, there’s two schools of thought:

  • The first is that they should be retained. They are, after all, valid image files that can be retrieved and overlaid on the map. Although they aren’t visually perceptible, the very presence of the file demonstrates that the dataset was tested at this location, and confirms that no features exist there. This provides important metadata about the dataset in itself, and confirms the tile generation process was complete. The blank images themselves are generally small, and so storage is not generally an issue.
  • The opposing school of thought is that they should be deleted. It makes no sense to keep multiple copies of exactly the same, blank tile. If a request is received for a tile that is not present in the dataset, the assumption can be made that it contains no data, and a single, generic blank tile can be returned in all such instances – there is no benefit of returning the specific blank tile associated with that tile request. This not only reduces disk space on the tile server itself, but the client needs only cache a single blank tile that can be re-used in all cases where no data is present.

I can see arguments in favour of both sides. But, for my current project, disk and cache space is at a premium, so I decided I wanted to delete any blank tiles from my dataset. To determine which files were blank, I initially thought of testing the filesize of the image. However, even though I knew that every tile was of a fixed dimension (256px x 256px), an empty tile can still vary in filesize according to the compression algorithm used. Then I thought I could loop through each pixel in the image and use GetPixel() to retrieve the data to see whether the entire image was the same colour, but it turns out that GetPixel() is slooooowwwww….

The best solution I’ve found is to use an unsafe method, BitMap.LockBits to provide direct access to the pixel byte data of the image, and then read and compare the byte values directly. In my case, my image tiles are 32bit PNG files, which use 4 bytes per pixel (BGRA), and my “blank” tiles are completely transparent (Alpha channel = 0). Therefore, in my case I used the following function, which returns true if all the pixels in the image are completely transparent, or false otherwise:

public static Boolean IsEmpty(string imageFileName)
{
  using (Bitmap b = ReadFileAsImage(imageFileName))
  {
    System.Drawing.Imaging.BitmapData bmData = b.LockBits(new Rectangle(0, 0, b.Width, b.Height), System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageLockMode.ReadOnly, b.PixelFormat);
    unsafe
    {
      int PixelSize = 4; // Assume 4Bytes per pixel ARGB
      for (int y = 0; y < b.Height; y++)
      {
        byte* p = (byte*)bmData.Scan0 + (y * bmData.Stride);
        for (int x = 0; x < b.Width; x++)         {           byte blue = p[x * PixelSize]; // Blue value. Just in case needed later           byte green = p[x * PixelSize + 1]; // Green. Ditto           byte red = p[x * PixelSize + 2]; // Red. Ditto           byte alpha = p[x * PixelSize + 3];           if (alpha > 0) return false;
        }
      }
    }
    b.UnlockBits(bmData);
  }

  return true;
}

 

It needs to be compiled with the /unsafe option (well, it did say in the title that this post was dangerous!). Then, I just walked through the directory structure of my tile images, passing each file into this function and deleting those where IsEmpty() returned true.