I've tried it and it's a hit and miss. In some places it worked perfectly. In another place it's like a drunk driver who ignores roads. Hehehe.
Merkaartor plans to incorporate this tool, experimentally, in the near future. I'm sure some JOSM person is also creating a plug-in for this since this tool's API is extremely simple. Here's an email by the Microsoft researcher who helped create the tool to the main OSM mailing list: Hi Guys, > > > > I am a researcher at Microsoft and I am currently working on the road > detector. > > I joined a bit late and can’t post answers in the existing road detector > thread, but I might be able to provide some additional info regarding the > road detector. > > It is **FAR** from being perfect, but in our experiments it may produce a > lot of value (== save time) if you use it correctly. When use it correctly > means don’t expect too much, so here are some practical tips: > > 1. It is currently uses the two end points as example and tries to > find a path that is similar to those examples, so it is recommended to use > the tool at a zoom level that will let you make sure you click on a road and > not near a road (we will probably loosen that restriction in the future). > > 2. Don’t try to challenge the detector too much, it will probably > fail, instead if you have a very complicated winding road break it into a > few sections and let it detect shorter legs (it will still save you most of > the clicks…) > > 3. One of the main features used is color, so if the road changes > its color a lot, break it again into shorter legs. > > 4. We currently only compute one path (road) between the points and > cannot provide a meaningful score for that path. Defining a score is a > difficult problem (but we are open to ideas…). > > 5. To speed things up, we are using a bounding box that is in many > cases smaller than the bounding box provided by the client (we take constant > margins around the bounding box defined by the two end points). This means > that if you click on the two end points of a U shaped road we might truncate > the lower part of the U and find a “shortcut “ through buildings, fields, > etc. And again you’ll need to break the query into shorter legs… (I am > currently working on speeding things up and I hope to get rid of this > limitation in a week) > > 6. The algorithm is currently ignoring junctions, but I should be > able to add them very soon (early next week) > > That is for road detection. The other mode we will provide is road > exploration which will enable finding all the roads in a certain bounding > box (well, you’ll probably need to click once or twice…) I am not sure if > there is an exposed version of this service (I hope not, since so far it is > really a bunch of experiments…) but we should have it really soon (a week or > two). For the road exploration we will probably have some kind of certainty > level for each road segment. > > > > I will be very happy to hear of any complaints/requests/places where you > think the detector should work but it fails/any other feedback. > > > > Thanks, > > Ido > On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 10:19 AM, maning sambale <emmanuel.samb...@gmail.com> wrote: > Not yet useful. I tested both the silverlight and openlayers demo. I > can't create a nice road trace both for straight grids and curvy > baguio type roads. Since the algorithm depends on imagery color, I > think tracing quality will depend on the image contrast, which varies > for different areas. > > It would be nice if the app can manipulate the base imagery like > setting image contrast to highlight the roads before tracing. > > Once the basic code/api is released by Bing, I'm sure osm-geeks can > develop the algorithm much better. ;) > > On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 8:40 AM, Eugene Alvin Villar <sea...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Here's something somebody whipped up to play around with things: >> http://maps.qualitystreetmap.org/bingtracing/ >> >> >> On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 8:37 AM, George Tujan <gtu...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> now that's pretty cool! >>> >>> On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 2:23 AM, Eugene Alvin Villar <sea...@gmail.com> >>> wrote: >>>> >>>> See this blog post: >>>> >>>> http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2011/02/03/automatically-detect-roads-with-bing-aerial-imagery.aspx >>>> >>>> And this YouTube video: >>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR0WV2dGIRc >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> talk-ph mailing list >>>> talk-ph@openstreetmap.org >>>> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ph >>> >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> http://vaes9.codedgraphic.com >> >> _______________________________________________ >> talk-ph mailing list >> talk-ph@openstreetmap.org >> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ph >> > > > > -- > cheers, > maning > ------------------------------------------------------ > "Freedom is still the most radical idea of all" -N.Branden > wiki: http://esambale.wikispaces.com/ > blog: http://epsg4253.wordpress.com/ > ------------------------------------------------------ > -- http://vaes9.codedgraphic.com
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