


The Map With AI effort resulted in RapiD, a machine learning-enhanced labeling tool that vastly accelerates the process of laying computer-readable roads on top of satellite imagery.Īs you can see in the first part of the video below, creating a road in the OSM system (called iD) ordinarily involves basically drawing the road on top of the satellite imagery using simple lines and curves. Over the last year and a half the company has mapped more than 300,000 miles of roads in Thailand, contributing them to the OpenStreetMap project.

In the developing world - for example, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America - where roads are not well-defined, maintained, or developed, even the best-trained human eye can struggle to identify and properly classify features,” said Dmitry Kuzhanov, a mapping expert in the ridesharing industry, in a Facebook blog post about the AI-powered effort.įacebook, of course, wants these far-flung folks to engage with its modern services. “Most modern algorithms, training sets, and techniques were invented to work for the areas with highly developed infrastructure.
