[Talk-GB] building shapes from OS Street View

[TimSC]

Hi all,

I have done a small test of automatically tracing buildings from OS 
Street View. I have limited this to Wood Street Village, near Guildford. 
I have not done any manual improvements but these should be done to 
improve the quality. I am not doing that yet so people can take a look 
at the result. It seems acceptable to me. I have implemented the code in 
python and uploaded it using JOSM. There was a glitch with duplicate 
nodes which JOSM validator fixed, I need to root out the cause in my code.

http://osm.org/go/eurUp7x0Q-

The biggest problem I can see is where roads or text labels obsure the 
buildings. This probably can be handled by manually checking the 
building outlines. So we might want to automatically get the outlines 
and do manual quality control. It might be worth manually using the JOSM 
orthogalise where required. I guess the fundamental question is, is this 
quicker than doing the whole thing manually?

http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/60094590

For far this is only a subsection of a tile. More work is required if we 
want to stream line things.

Any thoughts? *ducks*

TimSC