[OSM-talk] Free the postcode maps

[Joerg Ostertag]

...

> And then as a one-off job, we OCR these photos en' masse and use the GPS
> traces to get a coordinate for each street sign.  In much of London at
> least, each of these photos would contain full street name *and* the
> base postcode.  Yes, we'll get an astronomical error rate from bad
> lighting, fuzzy camera focus, laziness -- but I argue that courier
> redundancy could give us an excellent base for free London geocoding.

What about building a comparably small box with a webcam and a GPS-Mouse 
attached, which automatically makes shots of streetsigns as soon as it get 
the typical colors of streetsigns intosight?
My start to do this is a little bit documented here:
 http://www.ostertag.name/GPSLogger/NSLU2_GPS_Logger.html

I just saw on a website 
 http://euler.fd.cvut.cz/research/rs2/rs2algorithm.html
that they have a Linux Version of a road sign classificator. BUt I wasn't able 
to get hold of either the author nor the Software. If anyone knows something 
about this Road-Sign-Classificator I'd be happy to hear and test it.


-

Joerg