Google Firebase MLKit Vision API tweaking block bounds - ocr

I am experimenting with Google's new Firebase MLKit for iOS. I am playing with cloud text recognition in images, and am wondering how I can tweak the bounds of the text blocks.
This is the sample I am using: https://firebase.google.com/docs/ml-kit/ios/recognize-text
I can find documentation on doing this for Google's Cloud Vision, but not specifically for the MLKit implementation of Cloud Vision.
Text from images is being automatically placed into blocks. Some returned blocks should be combined, and others should be seperated. How can I go about tweaking the rules in which these blocks are generated. Refer to the sample provided.

Related

How to display custom vector tiles on Google Maps

The goal is to display large amount of data on Google Maps. By large amount I mean around 10 millions of segments stored in PostgreSQL database. The segments represent some characteristics of roads, so segments should overlay the roads in base map. The segment properties may change over time.
The best technical solution for this problem is to use custom tile server (please correct if wrong).
According to Google Maps JS API, I found out two ways to draw over the map using custom tile server:
using GeoJson/KML data (https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/datalayer#load_geojson)
using PNG images (https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/maptypes#ImageMapTypes)
I have tried both. The first one does not fit my needs because GeoJson appears too large, what results in performance issues. The second one is bad from UX point of view, because it is using raster tiles, whereas nowadays we should use vector tiles. I also looked at OpenLayers / Leaflet, but didn't find an official way to go with Google Maps (see https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/issues/1791).
The key here would be to use vector tiles, however I cannot manage to render vector tiles (MVT) on Google Maps.
Is there any ways at all to render vector tiles on Google Maps Platform?
I've reached Google Maps Platform support and they advised me to use a deck.gl.
It is a technology for displaying huge data sets on a map, including Google Maps. It uses official Google Maps API for rendering, especially OverlayView.
There is a good blog post about Google Maps & deck.gl here:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/maps-platform/high-performance-data-visualizations-google-maps-platform-and-deckgl
I've managed to display custom vector tiles on Google Maps using angular and here is the sample repo:
https://github.com/yterletskyi/deckgl-angular
BTW, thanks to LuisTavares solution about the https://github.com/landtechnologies/Mapbox-vector-tiles-basic-js-renderer library which relies on OverlayView too. I have not tried it but the approach is the same as in deck.gl so there should not by any issues.
UPD:
After playing around with deck.gl, the problem turned to implement this on mobile iOS & Android platforms. After some research I had contacted Google Support but unfortunately there seems to be no solution to this. Google Support quote:
Hello Yura,
Unfortunately there is no way to render vector tiles with the mobile APIs. I also have no recommendations for services that allow you to do this with the Google Maps API.
My apologies,
Check this library to load vector tiles in Google Maps:
https://github.com/techjb/Vector-Tiles-Google-Maps
You just have to create an mbtiles file, then upload to Mapbox or another server, and finally connect to Google Maps.

Google Cloud Vision Document OCR - keep layout in the resulted text

I use Google Cloud Vision Document OCR API. The resulted text that is returned by com.google.cloud.vision.v1.AnnotateImageResponse.getFullTextAnnotation().getText() is a little bit messy and lose the text formatting presented on the original image.
Is there with Google Cloud Vision Document OCR API a way to keep the layout(formatting) in the resulted text?
At this point of time(1/24/2018), there is no Rich Text Output from the Google Vision OCR. You can only differentiate the lines. There is other way around which is pretty time consuming using the bounding boxes, I don't think that's the solution you are looking for.

How can I make a heatmap like the price heatmap of Housing.com

I have been trying for some weeks to come up with a price map. My inspiration is the heatmap found on the website of Housing.com . The link to the map is:
https://housing.com/dsl/heatmaps/mumbai/buy
I have tried:
Google maps Javascript API 3
heatmap,js library
and many other websites.
The resulting map that I am getting is visually less appealing.
Have they defined boundaries for very small regions and then introduced the gradient(which, again I am unaware how to implement.)
Any thoughts on how it might have been implemented are welcomed.
They don't use Google Maps Heatmaps Layer in the application, or any other library for creating heatmaps. You can see that between the requests the webpage makes are images like this, this and also more for bigger zoom levels. They just render these images over custom styled google maps as tiles.
More on how to render custom tiles over google maps, check this part of docs. For more information how to style the map below the heatmap to look like in the example, check this parts of docs.
Creating tiles images to render over your google maps can be troublesome, there are some tools, like this one which should be able to help you, but is paid. I don't know of any free solutions, you can create it manually although it might take some time.
Hope this helps you to better understand the implementation techniques behind the referenced map.

Convert a single large image overlay to tiles for Google Maps

I have a large high-resolution image that I am using for an overlay using Google Maps v3 API. This works fine for desktop and laptop computers with a reasonable network connection, but unsurprisingly it does not work so well for mobile users.
What's the best/easiest way to break the image up into 2D tiles at the various zoom levels so I can act as a tile server for Google Maps via the API?
Is there a program that will reliably generate the tiles for me and provide me with the necessary zoom and coordinates for each resulting tile and/or give me the correct tile if I provide the zoom and coordinates?
Is it pretty easy to write a tile server to do it on the fly once you gather the right info? Perhaps there's source code out there that I can use as a model? (I found a tile server at http://blog.gmapify.fr/a-map-tile-server-part-2-understanding-google-maps-tile-overlays-and-building-up-a-tile-server which is certainly helpful, but it doesn't serve tiles from a source image, so I'd have to at least figure that part out...)
Or perhaps there is step-by-step algorithm that I can manually follow if that's more straightforward? (Since it's only one image and it covers an area on the map of maybe a square mile, manually doing it like that is perhaps feasible if not preferable.)
you can check MapTiler http://code.google.com/p/maptiler/. It can generate the tiles you need.
Tile server is really easy to write. The easiest way is just to host static files (your tiles) in a directory structure. The directory structure is then usually servername/zoom/x/y.png (or zoom/y/x.png). Such structure is also produced by MapTiler. MapTiler also generates an example web page using the tiles (but I guess it uses Google Maps API v2).
Information about using your tiles in Google Maps API v3 can be found here: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/maptypes.html#CustomMapTypese
You can do the entire thing clientside without tile pre-cutting
See https://github.com/Murtnowski/GMap-JSlicer
slicer = new JSlicer(document.getElementById('map'), 'myImage.png');
slicer.init();
Very simple.
There's a really good video tutorial on making maps with maptiler, which can be found here:
Mobile Maps That Aren't Terrible
It focuses on mobile maps, but also covers maptiler and other basics. I found that very helpful.

Using Google Maps controls for a large image

I have large images that I would like to have dragging and zooming controls like Google Maps. I started looking into Google Maps API and some other related websites, but I could not find something simple and easy.
MapKi tutorial suggests me to automatically cut tiles and add it as a custom map. This makes sense, but I have so many images in the file server that I don't have time to go through all of them and cut the tiles and figure out zoom levels for each. One good solution would be writing a script that can do this automatically, but that would take a lot of effort and time that has made to look for another solution if there is any.
Hence, is there a way to have similar functionalities as Google Maps controls for images without creating new images or tiles out of the original image. It would be great if you can either post some code or link to the tutorial/documentation. Or, if you know how to do this with Google API without making those tiles, please direct me to the right path. I'm a total newbie with Google Maps API.
I have found the DragZoom for Google Maps, but I don't think that's what I'm looking for.
You're looking for something like Djatoka
You should take a look at the IIIF protocol used by libraries and museums for zooming extremely large images (tens of thousands of pixels on a side +), preparing collections of images on canvases, presenting annotations on those images, etc.
http://iiif.io
…and just for the record here's an open source tiling server with a frontend viewer:
http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/
Check out https://github.com/Murtnowski/GMap-JSlicer
slicer = new JSlicer(document.getElementById('map'), 'myImage.png');
slicer.init();
It's super simple, no need for tile pre-cutting. Just point at a single image and go.