A WEST Perth aerial mapping company is raising eyebrows online as it posts near-Earth images of objects down to the size of your nose.

Nearmap produces “photomaps” of the surface using high-resolution cameras fitted to an aircraft flying every month over Australia’s major capital cities.

A before-and-after image of bushfire damage in King's Park / Image: Courtesy Nearmap

Its subscribers receive twitter alerts as the latest imagery, with resolutions between 3.5cm and 7cm, is made available online.

Nearmap’s photo gallery includes seals on a beach, coastal erosion at North Beach, fire damage at Toodyay, backyard swimming pools, carparks, new roads and runways.

The NearMap technology generates about 1 gigabyte of raw image data each second, the individual photographs compiled into seamless maps within days.

A subsidiary of intellectual property group ipernica, the company plans to fly its technology overseas, following the path pioneered by Google and Microsoft.

NearMap founder Stuart Nixon says the monthly photomaps cover about 60 percent of the population of Australia.

“This means we have covered about 60 percent of the area people live in at least once.

“Currently we are flying over five Australian cities every month.”

According to Mr Nixon, NearMap aims to cover about 20 percent of the world’s population, or up to 700 cities, beginning with those in Europe and the United States.

He says the Nearmap technology includes a high-resolution ‘virtual’ camera that covers a vastly bigger area than conventional aerial mapping technologies and at a much higher altitudes (up to 10,000 feet) to allow it to avoid air traffic problems.

“This allows us to compile the images very quickly,” Mr Nixon says, the company having mapped 20 percent of Victoria in less than 40 days.

Data from the 15-gigapixel camera is processed using supercomputer software.

Curtin University’s spatial sciences department head, Bert Veenendaal, says many of the applications of the technology were yet to be exploited.

The beauty is being able to image in detail features that change each month - such as the movement of freight cargo at ports and ‘suspicious’ cars at airports.

It also allows users to monitor changes to water levels in Perth lakes, feedstock around dams and illegally erected backyard pools and sheds.

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