Google maps blurred near Israel/Palestine/Egypt border

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Does anyone know why Google Maps blurs the area near the Egyptian border with Palestine and Israel? Image from google maps, red line added for emphasis.

Is it a political requirement by some government? Is it blurred that way on whatever satellite/fly-over imagery Google gets?

Whatever the case, it's the same on terraserver, down to the exact location of the blurring-line.

Not only did I not find an explanation for this during a quick google search, the websites I found about "What's blurred out on Google Maps," like this one, don't to include it.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I wouldn't have noticed this without looking at the nearby water. It's interesting; I find it easier to see larger ocean waves in the blurred area, sort of like low-pass filtering in lots of applications.

Comments

Colin said…
Gaussian blur (common for images) is identically low pass filtering. This is because convolution is just smearing (with a time reversal, but the kernel is symmetric so that does not matter).

Also, because the Fourier transform of a Gaussian is another Gaussian, the frequency response of a Gaussian blur is just a Gaussian.

Lastly, the sharpen function is often just boosts the high frequencies. The blur / sharpen toom is like a stereo equalizer for images!
May 3, 2011 at 12:38 AM
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