How to add an image without deforming it? (Preserve Scaling)

XionicFire

Hello all

So this is something that has nagged me for a long time, I've so far avoided it but this new customer NEEDS this data to be as accurate as possible, he has paper scans of the borders of his land but has no way to digitize them properly other than a super accurate high resolution scan (which we already did)

From what I've seen on the south part of the land, borders do match somewhat the terrain (streets, fences etc) but not on all the land, the part up north where its mostly forest there's no way to georeference it in any acceptable way.

I know global mapper can add an image and I can manually rectify/georeference it, we've tried doing this, but this warps and deforms the image to match the points, and sometimes far away parts of the image get super warped.

So the question is this:

Is there a way to just add the image to the map without messing with it/warping it in any way, just add it , even if its tiny, so I can then re-scale it/rotate it (all of it as one unit) using the GM existing tools until I can make the lines sort of fit with the existing roads on the south part so that way the north part is as accurate as possible?

After this I can then draw on top of the image the polygon, with as much detail as I can to match it as best as possible.

The workaround I've been currently using is exporting the terrain from GM as a Geotiff, then opening it on Adobe Illustrator, open the map image, overlaying it over the first one, rescale/rotating it until it matches, then drawing lines on top of the original Exported GM image, saving it, opening it on GM, re draw the lines I drew as vector and "sorta" get a decent accurate line map.

It works but its absurdly time consuming, there has to be a better way, can GM do something like this? it looks like it can but i cannot find out how, searched forums but nothing related came up.

I've tested the option of insert image at origin point instead of rectify, but when I click on zoom to layer it does nothing, zooming out to the galaxy and selecting everything also does not detect any items, and manually rectifying it warps it.

So I'm stumped, any help would be super appreciated

Thanks in advance

XionicFire

The image in question is this one, If I could add it without deforming it, aligning it to the real world would be super simple it would take a few minutes, the image is properly scaled.

XionicFire

And we realize this is not in any way the proper way to do this, but we just want "some" base to start work with the customer, the idea is to do the whole proper survey and get this properly digitized, but we cant even quote the work because we have no idea how much area the actual polygon is, there's a number there but 9/10 times those numbers never match the real world so we try not to take them into account for quoting.

CarrickCon

Hi @XionicFire,

I don't know of anyway to do what you are attempting in Global Mapper directly and I feel your pain about the "Fake Coordinate to Allow Viewing" tool which is petty well useless!

When I've needed to do something like this in the past I've first imported the non-georeferenced image into AutoCAD which won't distort the image (i.e. scale factor = 1) and then I move/stretch/re-size the image to known points (lot boundaries, centre of road junctions, corner of bldgs etc.), assuming of course that you have other mapping/survey data or imagery in AutoCAD which is already geo-referenced.

I then create a bounding box or frame in AutoCAD around the shifted/re-sized image and import that bounding box as a dxf/dwg back into GM and then manually geo-reference the image using the four corners of the box.

Its not millimetre accurate, but in the land of the blind, and all that...

Hope that helps. I too would be interested to hear if others have alternate workarounds.

Cheers,

/al

XionicFire

Hmm, your solution is more elegant than mine (illustrator) haha

I honestly think if we were able to do it the way you are doing it in AutoCAD but directly on GM would be a godsend, and yes when there's nothing else.. hand drawn is better than nothing.

If I did not hate AutoCAD with seething burning hatred id definitely do it that way over doing it in illustrator...

Now that you mention it, I wonder if BricsCAD can do something similar... its still garbage compared to Global Mapper but if there's no other way...

I actually like the manual rectification, sometimes its good that it can do that, but others when you know the shape of the image is fine its just the scaling/orientation that needs adjusting its killer.