Doing an Image Search? - google-maps

Is it possible to perform an image search with google maps? For example, if I had a small section of a map, showing road configurations, but there were no labels to indicate street names or place names, is there a possible way to do an image search, similar to what you can do with regular google, to be able to identify that location? I have tried this with the regular google, and it does not work. Does anyone know of software or an app that has the ability to do this? Thanks!

Yes it may be possible , But I do not think any software or app that is currently available a program would be need to be written that takes that small section of a map that you have and it would have to be a rather good quality image and preferaby in a raw Bitmap format and then the small section of the map you provide would have to be overlaid over the main google map and then moved around the map... scanned and each pixel compared frame by frame as the search picture is scanned across the bigger map and then a best-fit process would be utilized , and then when it finds a match it can then let you know just how closely it matches and what the confidence level it is that that the location found is actually correct , it would be best to narrow it down as much as possible as well, also a bit of artificial intelligence might be very useful here too, a face recognition A.I. program could be modified to complete that task. but as far as I know none of that exists in a single readily available app or program , maybe someday someone would create such a program? it is possible.

Related

How to start an embedded kml tour?

This is my first post, wooohooo! I've been using stack exchange when I needed information but usually someone had the same problem as me and I didn't need to make a post. Which means this website is really good.
Now turns out I have a pretty unique problem.
Please check out http://gaia.tru.ca/birdMOVES/
You will see a website with a google map. It is connected to a db which will be automatically updated.
The purpose of this website is to track how birds feed. There is going to be bird feeders equipped with NFC all over the world to track birds equipped with RFID when they feed.
I am taking care of the front-end, the web app for visualizing.
This is a work in progress so try not to care about the looks of it.
Apparently everything was written in RApache because the person who made everything this far is a Geography teacher(Not a lot of programming background, I had to refactor his code and learn R because it wasn't in my array of known languages.)
My client asked me to add time animation to his map. Feasible with the help of Google Earth.
I made the existing R code generate a tour. It works perfectly and even shows on my map.
Here is the address of my dev server: http://thelab.dyndns.org:1080/birdmoves/
You can see that there is an extra check box for time animation. If you check it, the tour will appear as an object on the map (no way to use it whatsoever right now).
So what I'd like to know is how do I make it work? How do I make it autoplay when the submit button is pressed? With standard google earth controls for rewind, pause and fast-forward. And independently from the google maps without tour?
This is intense. I have the feeling google earth isn't going to work because they deprecated all their gadgets.
I'm on the clock and I need help.
In case you were wandering what eventually happened:
We ended up making a hybrid website where the static visualization is within Google maps using kml and the time animation is within CesiumJs using CZML.
CZML is based off JSON and can be used very similarly to kml.
The api is also very nice, it only takes one line of javascript code to get a map running on an existing server.
To implement time visualization CZML supports putting multiple consecutive values for almost any property(like position, to animate movement, or even color to change colors) and takes account of time.
Also very nice, CesiumJs supports animated 3d models!
If you're interested http://cesiumjs.org/
It also has a lot of support, documentation and tutorials... etc..
It's being maintained by professionals. I really recommend it.
The Google Earth API got deprecated and will not function by December this year which is not a viable option for a long term service. So cesium was the only option for this specific project.
Cheers

Determine type of terrain at location

I'm trying to determine the terrain type at an arbitrary location. If I make use of Google Maps for instance, I can visually see what terrain is forest, built up areas and water for instance by the colour displayed on the map.
I'm trying to see whether there's any sort of API call I can use to get this basic information. I don't need it to be highly precise and I don't really need to determine the exact terrain type (so stuff like the Corine Land Cover is pure overkill). I'm going to need to make a number of these requests every few minutes. I've found a previously asked question around 3 years ago which wasn't really resolved, I'm hoping that there's been a change now.
Is there anything I can use? I'm actually considering reading the displayed map tile myself and grabbing the pixel colour, but I'd appreciate if there was a simpler method.
It doesn't seem like they provided the API to do that..
A work around would be to use their static maps API.
basically after you turn off everything but the water and greens, you get something like this:
http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=37.7833,-122.4167&zoom=10&format=png&sensor=false&size=640x480&maptype=roadmap&style=visibility:off&style=feature:water|element:geometry|visibility:simplified&style=feature:poi.park|element:geometry|visibility:on
you can, make the size to be 1px by 1px, zoom in, and check the color of this image to decide the type of area of this location.

open earth map with irregular station measurement overlays

I would like to draw a map of current temperatures (or air pressures, etc.) from many weather stations, with the underlying map still recognizable. the problem is easiest to think of as follows:
I have an array of spot measurements from irregularly spaced dots---think triples of GPS coordinates with one temperature value each. my stations can be very close to or very far apart from one another, and a user may want to zoom in or out. cold should be blue, warm should be red. Ideally, I would like to just pass the array, the color range, and have the rest be taken care of. I would prefer everything to be inside a web browser. The user needs to be able to zoom in, zoom out, move around, and get back to his current location.
I do not even know how to think about this problem. If a user has zoomed out enough, non-transparent dots could be so close as to obscure the terrain. However, zooming in, it would be nice to recognize the dot that is the station itself. This presumably requires some intelligence that realizes how many dots there are, e.g., relative to the density of the display? not sure.
I believe google maps charges for many API calls, so I would prefer using an open map and/or open API that can use different underlying maps. It does not have to be fancy. I don't care about directions, etc.---just a map that is recognizable at most zoom settings, with landmark and street names, and my nice temperature station overlay coloring, so that a user can visualize where it is cold and where it is warm.
(Stations come online and offline, but I don't need to update this more than once an hour. I can place the map measurements into a file that is URL web-accessible.)
is this an easy or a hard problem for the high-level web programmer?
/iaw
after looking around for a long time, I think the best way to do this is with html5 openlayers nexrad.
alas, the docs seem to be a mess. half the examples that I found did not seem to work. it's pretty hit-or-miss. similarly, the openlayers cookbook also seems to be outdated and has incorrect examples, but they did have a reasonably short example of such a nexrad map overlaid on the U.S., that one can further study.

Plotting tools for dashboard

After browsing for a while for available solutions, it is really hard to choose the most appropriate tool for creating dashboard & populating it with plots. I would want to have an html page with multiple plots and tables depicted. I'm thinking to have data input stored in csv files, appropriately formatted.
The requirements are:
plot coordinates are showing on mouse hover
ability to show coordinates of points on a plotted line (points in
scatter plot or bar values for bar chart) 'sticking' to the nearest
lines on hover, with appropriate handling of multiple lines (show several y values for same x)
ability to interactively switch plotted data on/off
easily embeddable into html page, doesn't require additional plugins installed
a good variety of plot types
not too slow to load and stable, there could be ~50 plots on one page
(this is for internal use only, so quickness is not that important)
does it all with minimal effort
So far I checked out (by no means a final opinion, correct me if I'm wrong):
gnuplot+canvas - looks good, but samples on their page fail to work
well for me, not always getting mouse clicks right
python+matplotlib+mplh5canvas - feels a bit raw, as I understand
some of the stuff above I'd need to implement in Python myself
RGraph looks awesome at first glance, not sure if it is good since never heard of
it and don't have any experience in js, hard to customize(?)
some other random stuff which seemed bad enough
Suggestions?
RGraph looks awesome, and is awesome. It's not difficult to use and there are a lot of examples online.
Rgraph Example page
They've got 22types of graphs, correct me if I'm wrong, and as I already said, easy to use.
Documentation about possibilities and stuff for each type of graph is also available on the website.
I end up using Highcharts because of its very advance features and ready-to-use templates (in addition to the things mentioned in the question).

How can i render a very big SVG file in HTML5?

I have recently wanted to create something similar to this on my own: http://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org/
It is basically a map of zipcodes for the United States. Currently, i have thousands of points that compose the Zip Code boundaries. With these coordinates, I created a KML file. However, it seems that the file is way too big (32MB) When i render it on the browser, it takes a long time to load and it looks very bury.
What approach should i take to make it faster?
What i want to do is to be able to see a map of all the zipcode areas in the United States. I should use SVG or Canvas. I chose to use SVG: http://danilocarrion.com/Map.html
Please let me know if there is a way to make it faster, sharper. Thanks
You might want to look into topojson, a tutorial and some instructions can be found here.