[OSM-talk] AI detecting of buildings Idle thoughts

[Christoph Hormann]

On Thursday 16 August 2018, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> In a way, it's what we did in Western Europe when we only had Landsat
> imagery: "Uh, this looks like a settlement, let's draw a grey blob"

Absolutely not.

The settlement structure of Western Europe can be pretty accurately 
mapped from Landsat images.

What the data import linked to contains has no similarity to this.  And 
even if it did superficially this would be a pretend similarity because 
the settlement structure in this part of the world looks nothing like 
that of Western Europe.  This is just taking some auto-detected 
buildings, throwing some random algorithms at it and labeling the 
resulting abstract geometries landuse=residential.

Ironically if you did do a halfway reasonable classification of 
settlement areas in Landsat data for this area the result would 
probably be much more like a verifiable mapping of settlements in the 
area than what we can see now in the database.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/