[OSM-dev] Doing street names from aerial imagery

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 24 March 2010 12:31, John Robert Peterson <jrp.crs at gmail.com> wrote:
> However due to the huge number of variables involved, I'd be surprised if
> there was any way a computer could do it faster or better:
<...>
> When you arrive on the ground you can find that there are names only at one
> end of a grid of streets, and your carefully pre planned route breaks.
> There are so many different kinds of areas (grid patterns; modern curvey
> estates, terraced areas, industrial parks, one way systems) that routing
> algorithms would have to be tweaked for each area;

To be precise the problem is greatly simplified by the fact that most
of the variables are unknown because you only have aerial imagery as a
source before you map the area, so you know nothing more than the
geometry.  A complete algorithm would have to go through each possible
combination of all the routing parameters (oneways, traffic calming,
label on one end, label on the other end, etc etc) and find a solution
that gives the best average result but usually it can assume that all
roads are equally passable and that both ends of every street need to
be visited, and get a very similar result.

Cheers