The Pudding has mapped Every Outdoor Basketball Court in the U.S.A.. I'm not sure why The Pudding decided to collate satellite imagery of every basketball court visible in Google Maps' aerial imagery but it is quite fun to play with.
My guess is that Every Outdoor Basketball Court in the U.S.A. is an experiment by The Pudding in using computer vision to detect, recognize and classify objects in large-scale imagery datasets. The use of AI-powered object detection in satellite imagery has become a useful tool and The Pudding's Basketball visualization is an interesting experiment in how the results of a remote sensing search of an area can be sorted and organized.
The 'about' section of Every Outdoor Basketball Court in the U.S.A. declares 'Court Locations via Open Street Map. Satellite imagery via Google.' It is possible that the Pudding could have used something like Overpass to search for basketball courts on OSM instead of using AI object detection. However the presence of a number of false positive images of satellite images of shapes which closely resemble basketball courts leads me to suspect that some form of machine learning trained on Google's satellite imagery was used to collect this data.
Anyway, if you are looking for an outdoor court in your area, you can simply type your address into The Pudding's visualization to find all your nearby basketball courts. Or, if for some reason you only like playing basketball on a particular color of court, you can also sort all the outdoor basketball courts in the USA by color.
No comments:
Post a Comment