OpenStreetMap
Did around 1 hour of driving to take footage of street signs and tracking data. Gets a bit embarrassed after a while going round and round, I went round an estate using keep left then goto centre as my method of getting all the roads. Unfortunately one street was blocked by a truck.
I wish there was an automated method of extracting street signs -> possibly use a mechanical turk to OCR them.
Discussion
Comment frae Stereo on 28 March 2013 at 14:06
Actually, Google uses reCaptcha to digitise house numbers so it’s definitely an interesting idea.
Comment frae superduck on 28 March 2013 at 22:41
@Stereo that’s exactly what I was thinking. I’ve heard speed sign recognition is reasonable straight forward for someone learning computer vision to do. I have no experience, but I’m assuming locating frames with street signs and rotating it might be a similar task.
Then push them over to a captcha solving service or Amazon mechanical turk.
My other idea was to use Amazon mechanical turk to draw outlines of buildings. Split a town into areas bounded by streets (around a small distance around streets where streets are far apart).
Sadly I have no expertise in this area, but I’d be willing to pay a few hundred for my town to be drawn.
It’s amazing how many streets are either wrong/missing or not split correctly in Google/Bing/Here maps in my area.
Comment frae superduck on 29 March 2013 at 23:34
I found this interesting tool: osm.wiki/MapRoulette