[OSM-talk] (magical?) road detector

[Ido Omer]

Hi Elizabeth,

Like in any interesting problem, we knew we will not be able to come up with a general solution for all roads under any condition.
We assume most people are mapping asphalt/concrete roads and we decided to focus our efforts there.
Eve there our solution is far from being perfect, but we believe in most circumstances it has a value that is larger than zero.
Strictly speaking, the current version doesn't look for road patterns; the next version might do that and provide a more general solution.
It will be useful for us to learn what the community needs are; I'll be happy if you could refer me to a few examples.

BTW, by not using the detector its usefulness should be around zero, it is hard for me to imagine how can it drop much lower than that (at least for the long run, after you wasted a couple of minutes and found out it does not serve your needs)

Thanks,
Ido

-----Original Message-----
From: Elizabeth Dodd [mailto:edodd at billiau.net] 
Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2011 2:27 PM
To: talk at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] (magical?) road detector

I've made one attempt only at tracing a dirt road in dry country with the detector. I found its usefulness less than zero, as the system told me that too many tiles were involved and quit. Zooming in is not always practical to spot these roads, where the pattern recognition is a very long straight feature on a photograph, and same colour as the surrounds for a dirt road in dry country, and a dark colour for a railway.
Having spotted the road then it is easier to find in zoomed images when looking for curved bits through (dry) waterways.
I went back to doing it by hand, so for me it had a uselessness of less than zero.

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