Draw a line on your screen and Land Lines will match it to an identically shaped line of a building or geological feature on the globe. It’s a beautiful, weird, wonderful way of exploring the Earth.
“Land Lines lets you explore Google Earth satellite images through gesture,” the website reads. “Machine learning and line detection algorithms were used to preprocess all images and identify the dominant lines. This enabled the analysis of brushstrokes and retrieval of the matching image efficiently without the need for a server.”
Land Lines is the work of internet artists and Brooklynites Zach Lieberman and Matt Felsen. The pair wrote that they used “a combination of OpenCV Structured Forests and ImageJ’s Ridge Detection to analyze and identify dominant visual lines in the initial dataset of 50,000+ images.”
This allowed them to reduce the number of images in the database to a few thousand of the most interesting ones.
Check out Land Lines in action here:
