[Imports] Facebook's AI-Assisted Road Tracing for OSM

[Robert Banick]

Very cool Kevin, I’m looking forward to the +Vivid release!

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 6:40 AM Kevin Bullock <kevinbullock10 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Everyone, it's Kevin representing DigitalGlobe. I do understand the
> situation and I think some good points have been made in this thread. If
> you've seen my SOTM presentations from last year, I have spoken at length
> about the DG business model of licensing data. In short, we do this to
> sustain our business and to operate, develop and launch more satellites!
>
> I'm happy to report we are making progress towards an exciting option that
> would allow DG to publish an imagery layer directly for OpenStreetMap
> editing. This is being funded by a group of organizations, and would make
> the +Vivid imagery layer available for registered OSM editors (the source
> for Facebook). I am hoping this will resolve many of the concerns for
> validation. The timeframe for this is likely 4-8 weeks. It will likely
> warrant a new thread/forum somewhere instead of being embedded in the
> Thailand thread and this one.
>
> Thanks to everyone for their feedback and agreeing with the sentiment of
> appreciation to Facebook for all the work they are doing to improve OSM and
> sending informative communications.
>
> Kevin Bullock
>
> On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 5:11 PM, Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 16/03/2017 21:46, Kate Chapman wrote:
>
> 1. We can't demand more of Facebook than others doing imports. When a
> government releases data under an open license we don't demand to see the
> imagery they used to make it. I purchase the same imagery Facebook does for
> my job and our license also ensures that we have the rights to release the
> derived vectors under the license we choose. I think this is sufficient.
>
>
> Indeed, but it's worth bearing in mind a couple of points:
>
> 1) One is that unless people can compare the source DG imagery with the
> the derived roads, it's not possible to judge the process.  The first time
> that Facebook tried something like this in Egypt nad Thailand there were a
> very large number of false positives - many straight edges with a contrast
> change in the image (e.g. the edges of drainage channels in Egypt) were
> detected as "roads", and even with real roads there were many connectivity
> issues.  It may well be that the method by which roads are now detected is
> much improved (but it looks like image 3 may show some of the same
> connectivity detection problems as before), but without access to the DG
> imagery used, no-one can tell.
>
> 2) The discussion on the Thai forum has suggested that it'd be useful for
> OSM mappers to access the DG imagery for mapping purposes other than road
> derivation (see e.g.
> https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=632472#p632472 and
> https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=634119#p634119 ).
>
> Obviously there may be commercial hurdles to climb in order to do either
> of these, but it'd be difficult to comment on the accuracy of the the
> import without at least (1).  However in case people are unaware DG have
> already responded in the forum thread
> https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=634735#p634735 and said
> "we are looking at options to publish", so this may be in hand.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Andy
>
>
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