OpenStreetCam plug-in – Search Box for detection filtering

The most recent version of the OpenStreeCam plugin contains a new feature for improving detection filtering. This option became a need due to the significant growth of sign types. Its main purpose is to increase the ease of finding data. Therefore, the signs displayed in the characteristic area are reduced.

The team has added a search box to enable users to find a specific sign by entering keywords. To make filtering more relevant, the typed words should include the category, the sign name, or a combination of these two information. As a result, the detection type area will be sorted according to the input text.

This feature also works alongside the selected value for the region.

We’ll strive to continuously improve the OpenStreeCam plugin with new features!

Facebooktwitter

OpenStreetCam and ImproveOSM are moving to Grab

Following Telenav’s strategic partnership with Grab, we’re announcing that the OpenStreetCam and ImproveOSM platforms are moving to Grab! The goal of contributing to the OSM project by supporting the community with tools and data remains unchanged, and users will continue to benefit from those platforms.

  • Data and applications: The data is available to the OSM community just as before, with better latency for many.
  • Open Source: Good news, the code license is changing from LGPL to the more permissive MIT license. The imagery license will remain the same, CC BY-SA version 4.
  • Policies: The Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy were updated to reflect the project’s transition to Grab, other than that similar to the previous OpenStreetCam policies.
  • OpenStreetCam apps: The iOS and Android apps will now be published under the Grab AppStore / Google Play account – that makes no difference in contributing awesome imagery to the community! You can download and use the apps as usual.
  • Waylens: You can keep using your Waylens dashcams to contribute imagery to OpenStreetCam.

As always, we look forward to collaborating with the community members and improving OSM.

Facebooktwitter

An ImproveOSM editor update

When we first released ImproveOSM, the Telenav initiative to share millions of potential missing road, turn restriction and one-way locations based on massive anonymized GPS signals from drivers, we also launched a custom editor based on iD.

The ImproveOSM editor, based on iD.

The editor provided an easy way to inspect ImproveOSM data and make OSM edits based on it.

Since then, we have worked hard to build out the functionality of the ImproveOSM JOSM plugin, and worked with the iD team to integrate ImproveOSM into the main OSM web editor.

OpenStreetMap’s built-in iD editor with ImproveOSM layer

These developments have made the custom editor obsolete, and we have decided to take it offline.

If you are interested in using ImproveOSM data to edit OpenStreetMap, please check out our JOSM plugin or select the ImproveOSM overlay in iD. You can also download the raw data from our ImproveOSM web site.

Thanks for using ImproveOSM and making OpenStreetMap better!

Facebooktwitter

OpenStreetCam – Confidence level visualization

The OpenStreetCam plug-in has once again brought a new feature to help its users. It now allows displaying and filtering aggregated detections based on their confidence level. The confidence level represents a measure of confidence of the validity of the detection or aggregated detection.

New aggregated detections display

Aggregated detections can now be displayed using a confidence level based color code. This is an optional behavior that can be turned on in the plug-in preference settings by selecting the following preference:

If selected, each aggregated detection will be displayed with a border of the corresponding color, according to the legend table displayed under the check-box.

Map display based on confidence level:

If the checkbox is not selected, all aggregated detections are displayed with a white border.

Confidence level filtering

With the introduction of the confidence level attribute, a new form of filtering was added. Filter data now allows setting a value for minimum and/or maximum confidence level. When set, only the aggregated detections with the appropriate confidence level will be displayed.

The confidence level minimum and maximum must be values between 0 and 1.
Facebooktwitter

ImproveOSM plugin – design updates

The latest version of the OpenStreetCam JOSM plugin has many design changes which make the usage more intuitive. The Telenav OSM team added new icons for the three main layers of the ImproveOSM plugin (Turn Restriction, Traffic Flow Direction, Missing Roads) and modified the cluster colors accordingly.

new icons in the layers’ panel
new icons in the menu

Also, some improvements were made regarding the visualization of turn restriction detections at a high zoom level. The color for the grouped detections was changed in order to match the aspect of the corresponding cluster and to facilitate spotting the detections from the map, the turn restriction icon was  changed too.

Facebooktwitter

ImproveOSM plugin – new features

The Telenav OSM team just released a new version of the ImproveOsm plugin.  We have added a location search box (helpful feature for reaching an area to be mapped) and a button for downloading previously selected ways.

Location search box

A new feature we added to the ImproveOSM plugin is the location search box.  It enables the user to visualize the desired geographical point at a higher zoom level after entering its coordinates in the text field.                     The input of the search box should contain the values for latitude and longitude separated by a comma. If the plugin doesn’t understand your input, an intuitive message is displayed in order to help you. This works similar to the JOSM Jump to position but the search box brings advantages such as the single field for data collecting and more validations for the latitude-longitude values.



Download way button

Another feature is the download way button for the Traffic Flow Direction layer. This enables the user to download the ways of the selected road segments in a new Data layer. This option is only available if the Traffic Flow Detection Layer is active. Furthermore, the button becomes enabled when one or more road segments are selected.

Facebooktwitter

Summer Dispatch From The Telenav Map Team

It has been an exciting summer! Besides our regular work, there was the annual State of the Map conference that we were all really looking forward to. We launched a new ImproveOSM web site. OpenStreetCam dash-cams are distributed to OSM US members. And more. Read all about it in our Summer Dispatch below!

State of the Map

Quite a few of us got to go to State of the Map in Milan, Italy! Our team hosted four presentations at the conference, and we are really happy with the interest and feedback we received. We made a lot of new map friends as well!

All SOTM presentations were recorded and posted on YouTube, so if you missed any of us, you can watch the presentations at your leisure:

Alina and Bogdan presenting our Machine Learning stack at SOTM 2018

We also had a booth at the conference where we talked about ImproveOSM and OpenStreetCam, and where 6 lucky winners received a Waylens OpenStreetCam dashboard camera!

Excited crowd right before one of the Waylens cameras is being given away!

Mapping

We continue to map in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. As always you can track our work on GitHub. We have been focusing a lot on adding missing road names for the larger metropolitan areas in the US. Our typical workflow is to identify local government road centerline data sources, verify the license, process them with Cygnus to find changed / new names, and manually add the names if we can verify them.

Local road centerline data the team identified in Colorado

We are excited that the US community is looking to build an overview of available road centerline databases from (local) governments. We hope the ones we identified can help bootstrap this initiative.

We also published some MapRoulette challenges around this topic. 

ImproveOSM

Right on time for State of the Map, we launched a complete redesign of improveosm.org, our portal for everything Telenav❤️OSM. The new site gives you quick access to our OSM initiatives, data and tools. Check it out!We also released more than 20 thousand new missing roads locations. These are added to the existing database of currently more than 2.4 million missing road locations. An easy way to start editing based on these locations is to download the ImproveOSM plugin for JOSM.

Locations of the new Missing Roads locations

OpenStreetCam

The steady growth of OpenStreetCam continues. Almost 4.5 million kilometers of trips are in the OSC database. This amounts to about 165 million images!

We started a collaboration with OpenStreetMap US to run a Camera Lending program. Through the program, OSM US members can apply to borrow a custom Waylens Horizon camera for up to three months. The camera captures high resolution images for OSC and uploads them automatically. Almost 20 mappers have a camera already, and they have driven about 30 thousand kilometers in the past couple of months!

The passenger’s seat of our Camera Man ToeBee, as he gets ready to dispatch a bunch of Waylens cameras

That’s a wrap for our summer dispatch folks! Thanks for reading and keep an eye on the blog for more from the Telenav Map Team. Be sure to follow us on Twitter as well @improveOSM and @openstreetcam. 👋🏼

 

Facebooktwitter

Map Metrics for OSM are now available

Telenav’s OSM team just released a portal where you can view different metrics on OSM.

Unlike other metrics views that are already available, this new tool for the OSM community is focused especially on navigation attributes like length of navigable roads, the number of turn restrictions, signposts, and many more, in total 22 of such metrics are available. You can check it out at https://metrics.improveosm.org

About the data

Metrics are computed weekly and should be available on the portal at the end of each week. Metrics are generated for the whole world using as input the planet pbf downloaded from the official mirrors made available by the OSM community

Metrics are available starting with 8th February 2016. In the top left corner, you can choose to see them by week, by month, or by quarter. We also have a nice feature for all OSM enthusiasts! For each metric in the left menu, you have a small info button where you see exactly what the metric means: complete description and the rules we applied when computing them, which tags were used if we counted ways, nodes or relations, etc.

How do we do it?

The platform was built using Apache Spark. Using big data technologies enabled us to have metrics for the whole world: on countries, states, counties, and a few metropolitan areas (metros are available only in North America for now). In order to use Apache Spark, we had to convert pbf to parquet first, so we achieved this using a packetizer that is open source and can be found here.  After we have the parquets, using Spark’s DataFrame API we managed to have these metrics available in just a couple of hours.

We have also made the latest parquet files available for general use here.

If you have any suggestions or feedback, please do not hesitate to contact us. You can find details in the About section.

Happy mapping!Facebooktwitter

Geohash JOSM plug-in

The Telenav OSM team has a new JOSM plugin for you: Geohash. This plug-in displays a layer on top of the JOSM map that contains the corresponding geohashes, up to zoom level 10. It also allows searching for a specific geohash and moves the map to the corresponding area.

Our team has been using this plugin internally and thought it may be useful for some of you as well.

This plug-in can be used by those who work in specific areas based on geohash units.

How to use the Geohash plug-in

The geohashes are automatically generated based on the user map view and zoom level. Increased zoom means increased depth level for geohashes.

To search for a geohash, use the Geohash plug-in dialog. Type or paste the geohash code in the text field and press the Search button. If the code is invalid, a message will be shown. Otherwise, the map view will be moved and zoomed over the selected geohash.

To clear generated geohashes, double click a geohash and all geohashes from his parent will be cleared. Also, right click on Geohash layer will show the option to ‘Clear geohashes’ that will leave only the depth one grid.

You can find the source code here: https://github.com/Telenav/geohash-plugin

We are looking forward to your feedback!Facebooktwitter

Working with ImproveOSM Data Dumps

Our ImproveOSM pipeline produces a pretty impressive number of suggested roads missing from OSM, missing oneway tags, and missing turn restrictions, based on analysis of billions of GPS data points. We make the results available as frequent data dumps in CSV format. In this post, I want to look at a way to integrate this data into your OSM mapping workflow.

If you just want to see ImproveOSM data in JOSM wherever you are currently mapping, you can just use the ImproveOSM JOSM plugin. For advanced users who want more flexibility, or who want to use this data in different ways, this post offers some guidance.

The data dumps are available from here. For this example, I will work with the most recent Direction of Flow data file. This highlights ways with potential missing oneway tag. After downloading and unzipping it, you will have a CSV file of about 16.5 megabytes that looks like this:

wayId;fromNodeId;toNodeId;percentage;status;roadType;theGeom;numberOfTrips
148617028;1867720648;89191396;99.5378927911275;SOLVED;THROUGHWAY;LINESTRING(2.217821 48.922613,2.217719 48.922618,2.217408 48.922633);1082
33555379;322840377;322840383;98.6301369863014;INVALID;LOCAL_ROAD;LINESTRING(4.999815 47.34294,4.999957 47.343062,4.999965 47.34315);146
17271190;178942503;2341050872;100;OPEN;LOCAL_ROAD;LINESTRING(11.070503 50.139245,11.070525 50.139213,11.070616 50.139099,11.070693 50.139032);74
.....

Since the theGeom field is in WKT, you can import it as a layer in QGIS pretty easily. Let’s fire up QGIS (I use 2.18) and add a Delimited Text layer.

In the dialog, select the downloaded CSV file as the file source. Set the delimiter to semicolon. QGIS detected for me that the geometry was in the theGeom field, and of type WKT, but you can set that manually if needed:

Upon clicking OK, QGIS wants us to define which CRS the coordinates are defined in. Select WGS84.

Now, we have a layer of line geometries that correspond to OSM ways that may be missing a oneway tag.

To make the file more manageable, let’s limit our selection to one country. I get country boundaries from Natural Earth (a fantastic resource!). After adding the country borders to QGIS, I can perform a spatial query. Before you do this, select the country you are interested in. I pick Mexico as an example.

Bring up the Spatial Query window. If you don’t see this menu item, you will need to enable the Spatial Query plugin.

Select the ImproveOSM layer as the source, and the Natural Earth layer as the query layer. Make sure to check the ‘1 Selected geometries’ checkbox, so we limit our query to Mexico.

The matching features will now be selected in the ImproveOSM layer. Make sure that layer is selected in the Layers Panel before you select Layer -> Save As.. from the QGIS menu. In this dialog, choose GeoJSON as the output type. Select a destination filename. Make sure that the CRS is set to WGS84. Make sure the ‘Save only selected features’ is checked, and Save.

Now you have a GeoJSON file with all OSM way geometries that may need a oneway tag. You can load this file into JOSM, using its GeoJSON plugin. To organize your work going through these, I would recommend using the Todo plugin and add the GeoJSON features to the todo list.Facebooktwitter