Hello, a couple quick ideas you might have already considered:
- Optional parameters in the API to provide additional information for the
algorithm, for example:
...&roadcolorsample=<RGB_values>(the user has previously sampled the road color
by clicking several times the roads of that area)
...&areatype={urban,suburban,rural,...}
...&shadowsheading=<heading>...&shadowslength={short,medium,long}(some aerial
images have very visible shadows, all in the same direction of course)
- I don't know how your algorithm works, but if it generates several solutions,
you might return an array of linestrings instead of just one. Sophisticated
clients will show them all, simple clients will use the first.
regardsJuan Lucas
--- On Fri, 2/4/11, Ido Omer <ido.o...@microsoft.com> wrote:
From: Ido Omer <ido.o...@microsoft.com>
Subject: [OSM-talk] (magical?) road detector
To: "talk@openstreetmap.org" <talk@openstreetmap.org>
Date: Friday, February 4, 2011, 7:59 PM
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
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