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In many places, OSM can be improved with satellite imagery

• Kadin 8y ago
  Yes, agreed. In built-up areas it's not like roads move very often. I wonder if someone couldn't do "deltas" of satellite imagery to produce some sort of heatmap of how quickly various areas are changing. That would give you an idea of what areas are 'safe' to map based on satellite imagery, and what areas are changing too quickly and need to be mapped some other way. It would also give you a way of automatically flagging stale data on the vector map; if something hasn't been updated in 12 months and you know from imagery that the area is under heavy development, those map features are probably not trustworthy anymore.
  • perennate 8y ago
    Development Seed has a project Urchn that was trying to do something like that: https://medium.com/devseed/make-sense-of-urban-change-fabb9ff229d7 https://medium.com/devseed/make-sense-of-urban-change-fabb9f... The idea was to take satellite imagery of the same location from different timestamps and I believe use deep learning to determine if anything in the imagery changed. I don't think they've released any code for that project yet though. But for determining whether or not the imagery could be used in a certain region, it might make more sense to just compare the timestamps of the vector data and the imagery. For instance, if the road doesn't appear in the imagery, but the vector data timestamp is after the imagery timestamp, then keep the road. And don't add a road if it was covered by a map segment that was deleted some time between the imagery timestamp and the current time.