Land Lines, a new Chrome Experiment exploiting the satellite image data collated by Google Maps, allows anyone—cartographic aficionado or otherwise—to marvel at the contours of the world through gestures. Intelligently designed to detect dominant visual lines from a dataset of thousands of images, cut down from over 50,000 by using a combination of OpenCV Structured Forests and ImageJ’s Ridge Detection, users can simply "draw" or "drag" on a mobile browser or on a desktop to "create an infinite line of connected rivers, highways and coastlines."
Interestingly, by employing "a combination of machine learning, optimized algorithms, and graphics card power," the experiment is able to run efficiently on a web browser without a need for heavy backend servers. The experiment has been made by Zach Lieberman, Matt Felsen, and the Data Arts Team.
