About mapping features with computer vision

Help and support
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I will first reply this as I feel kind of obligated now because you brought my employer to the discussion and questioned my investments/research in the topic.

I will try to then be more proactive suggesting some ideas I have to improve the verification of AI systems that want to contribute to OSM.

I have never claimed to be better than anyone. Here is an outline of my research for the topic:

  1. My first interaction with training models from OSM data was 6 years ago when I took part of several public and private projects. One example is Inicio | Inspeccións Intelixentes Avanzadas . During this project data from OSM was used and curated but never contributed back. I didn’t have any decision power to make it different. I did read every paper?(at least all from stuff like CVPR) and investigated every (I could find)? open source project mixing osm and ml.

That’s when I started wanting to work on a side project to use OSM data to train a model to then contribute to OSM back.

  1. Over 2 years ago I got the opportunity to work on a similar project and I started manually mapping swimming pools (Changeset: 129636667 | OpenStreetMap). After some initial efforts I found that the existing polygon data was not reliable enough to train a polygon predictor, so I focused on training bounding boxes that I used to find the swimming pools and then manually draw the polygons.

  2. A couple of weeks ago I got the opportunity to work on a project of my choice and I chose to work on this. I tried recent segmentation models that don’t rely on the quality of OSM polygons (SAM2) and found decent enough*(criteria discussed above) results. I discussed with my employee the idea to publish the project. I didn’t discuss it with the OSM and should have done it, as I already said.

First of all, I work for mozilla.ai which is a separate startup (funded by mozilla) focusing on exploring open source AI. That is not the same people behind your browsing exprience (which is also exploring AI, and we all should start accepting that there is no going back).
I know this company structure is not obvious for outcomers (or me) but just wanted to clarify that.

The only thing that mozilla.ai did was allow me to dedicate part of my time to a project of my choice, and I chose to do this.

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