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Researchers Are Proposing a New Way To Generate Street Addresses by Extracting Roads From Satellite Images (technologyreview.com) 48

An estimated 4 billion people in the world lack a physical address. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Facebook are now proposing a new way to address the unaddressed: with machine learning. From a report: The team first trained a deep-learning algorithm to extract the road pixels from satellite images. Another algorithm connected the pixels together into a road network. The system analyzed the density and shape of the roads to segment the network into different communities, and the densest cluster was labeled as the city center. The regions around the city center were divided into north, south, east, and west quadrants, and streets were numbered and lettered according to their orientation and distance from the center.

When they compared their final results with a random sample of unmapped regions whose streets had been labeled manually, their approach successfully addressed more than 80% of the populated areas, improving coverage compared with Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps. This isn't the only way to automate the creation of addresses. The organization what3words generates a unique three-word combination for every 3-by-3-meter square on a global grid. The scheme has already been adopted in regions of South Africa, Turkey, and Mongolia by national package delivery services, local hospitals, and regional security teams. But Ilke Demir, a researcher at Facebook and one of the creators of the new system, says its main advantage is that it follows existing road topology and helps residents understand how two addresses relate to one another.

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Researchers Are Proposing a New Way To Generate Street Addresses by Extracting Roads From Satellite Images

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  • Everyone with a fixed "residence" - even if it's not on any road - has an ICBM address [wikipedia.org], even if they don't know it.

    They also have other "your location is your address" addresses [wikipedia.org].

  • by Khopesh ( 112447 ) on Friday November 30, 2018 @05:43PM (#57728982) Homepage Journal

    Consider what a generative adversarial network [wikipedia.org] (GAN) can do to such an algorithm. Perhaps all an attacker needs to do is paint some rooftops in a manner that creates an off-by-one error on counting streets and then they can misdirect (or even intercept) somebody's mail.

    Read this article on Camouflaged Graffiti on Road Signs Can Fool Machine Learning Models [thenewstack.io] (from 1y ago) for some examples of how simple stickers or graffiti can fool these systems. It also hit Slashdot, though all I can find is an article on 'Psychadelic' Stickers That Confuse AI Image Recognition [slashdot.org].

    • by Khopesh ( 112447 )
      The article I was thinking of was from the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research [berkeley.edu] (BAIR) Lab, entitled Physical Adversarial Examples Against Deep Neural Networks [berkeley.edu] (The "YOLO attack"), which stated:

      Adversarial examples raise security and safety concerns when applying DNNs in the real world. For example, adversarially perturbed inputs could mislead the perceptual systems of an autonomous vehicle into misclassifying road signs, with potentially catastrophic consequences. ...

      We are still a long way from find

    • In many neighborhoods, all someone has to do to intercept mail is go over and take the mail out of the unlocked mailbox. I hardly think worrying about mail thieves painting rooftops is a productive use of time, it would be much more conspicuous and easy to prosecute.

  • Maybe they could get street addresses by next election...
  • I like Plus Codes (Score:4, Informative)

    by djbckr ( 673156 ) on Friday November 30, 2018 @06:00PM (#57729062)
    I like Plus Codes [plus.codes]. They are well thought out and open and free. I'd like to see more adoption of it.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      What3words seems nice because you get down to 3m resolution with just 3 words: easy to remember. Memorizing your Plus code is a lot harder, some people have trouble remembering their zip code, typically 6-7 characters. Are there any other (unique) advantages to Plus Codes?
      • Plus, for most plots of land you have a number of opportunities to find a 3x3m square named something memorable/apropos. For example, on the Apple campus there's burn.count.mint [what3words.com], stable.elite,hype [what3words.com], owners.lift.bronze [what3words.com], and so on.

      • What3Words has a big drawback: the words are assigned randomly, which makes it impossible to figure out where an address is without accessing the What3Words database. It's not human-usable without computer assistance.
        This makes What2Words likely to fail: countries that aren't organized enough to have street addresses worked out, are usually too poor for the citizens to be able to afford satnav systems.

        Conventional street addresses are grouped: city, street, number. Large area, smaller area, 1 house.
        When you

    • by Anonymous Coward

      https://plus.codes/ [plus.codes] is the URL.
      They work in Google Maps, BTW.

      There are rural places all over the world that need a good addressing system that works regardless of internet connections.

      They are open. Anyone can use the algorithm. That's why W3W fails with their proprietary crap. If w3w opened it up, it is a great tool.
      Plus.codes let you determine the resolution - need a few acres or a tiny food stall - you decide.
      They don't use look-alike letters/numbers.

      I lived at 66XQXRXV+XC for a few months, then moved to

  • by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Friday November 30, 2018 @07:00PM (#57729342)
    In most places, you can't use satellite images to trace roads because of this minor obstacle known as TREES! Yeah, I've looked at Google Maps in satellite mode.. a lot.
  • Why not just use longitude and latitude? Kind of naive to assume that every home has a road going to it, isn't it?
    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      Because most people understand their location relative to a road, trail or intersection. The problem isn't to assign an identifier to each location in a town. It's to get people to remember and use something that they are already familiar with.

  • by PPH ( 736903 )

    ... who is going to volunteer to give these people: https://map.what3words.com/reciting.state.comebacks [what3words.com] their handy three word address?

  • Google developed this exactly for these purposes. They show up in maps already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code [wikipedia.org].

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