Archive for March, 2009

Published by breki on 31 Mar 2009

GroundTruth v1.3

GroundTruth ContoursGroundTruth ContoursGroundTruth relief contoursGroundTruth relief contours

A new version of GroundTruth has finally been released! I covered new features in previous posts:

I’ve already updated the GroundTruth For Dummies page on OSM wiki with some basic instructions, I’ll update the manual in the next few days.

DOWNLOAD LINK: http://downloads.igorbrejc.net/osm/groundtruth/

Licensing & Sources

GroundTruth is released under GPL v3 license. You can find the sources on this link.

Enjoy! And if you find the software useful, please consider a small donation to the author:

Thanks!

Published by breki on 31 Mar 2009

GroundTruth: Experimenting With cGPSmapper’s Settings

While testing contours generation in GroundTruth, I wanted to find out which values for the following cgpsmapper settings are optimal:

  • TreSize
  • SimplifyLevel
  • PreProcess

SimplifyLevel

This setting specifies the simplification level for Douglas-Peucker simplification algorithm used by cgpsmapper. The value range is from 0.1 (maximum simplification) to 10 (no simplification). Of course, more the map features are simplified, the smaller the IMG file will be, but you loose data quality. After experimenting with this value, here are my conclusions:

  • The simplification level does not affect the cgpsmapper’s speed of generating IMG files.
  • There is no real noticeable difference in map quality between level 10 and 1.
  • There is a noticeable difference in map quality between level 1 and 0.1 (see screenshots below).
  • Total map sizes: 53 MB (level 10), 44 MB (level 1), 25 MB (level 0.1)

Conclusion: SimplifyLevel 1 seems to be the best compromise between the map size and its quality.

PreProcess

This setting specifies what kind of preprocessing of data will be done by cgpsmapper (generalizations, intersection detections…). I did not notice any real difference when using any one of possible options. The map size is the same, so is the generating speed and map quality.

Conclusion: I’ll leave this setting to be specified by the user.

TreSize

This one is hard – I don’t really know exactly what this setting is really all about. To quote cgpsmapper’s manual:

Maximum allowed region size. A higher value increases the allowable region size, but may decrease the map performance; a lower value may increase the map size.

As I stated in previous post, TreSize value of 4000 caused generation of certain map tiles to fail. The failed tiles contained a lot of contour data. So I lowered it to 2500 and then it worked without problems. When I tried TreSize of 1000, it generated a little bit larger map and took a little bit more time.

Conclusion: I think TreSize=2000 is the best compromise value.

Contours with SimplifyLevel value of 1:

GroundTruth Relief Contours

Contours with SimplifyLevel value of 0.1. Notice how contour lines at the top of the map now have much sharper edges:

GroundTruth Contours

Published by breki on 31 Mar 2009

GroundTruth Contours: Final Testing

I did some testing of relief contours generation before the official release of GroundTruth v1.3. I generated 10m interval contours for area of Slovenia and its neighboring regions, and here are some numbers:

  • Area: minlat:45, minlng:13, maxlat:47, maxlng:17
  • IBF file size: 28 MB (IBF file contains contours information in a binary form). My estimate is that the equivalent Srtm2Osm-generated OSM XML file would be at least 350 MB large.
  • Time taken to generate Garmin IMG files from IBF file: 15 minutes on my machine
  • Total size of generated IMG files: 53 MB
  • Total IMG files count: 125 files

As you can see from the first screenshot below, the contour files are split into a 15′ grid. You can therefore choose which of the tiles you want to upload to your GPS unit.

I had some problems with cgpsmapper reporting “Too Big RGN Table Structure” error for grid cells with a lot of contours. To overcome this, I reduced the cgpsmapper’s TreSize setting from 4000 to 2500 and then it worked without problems.

I’ll also try to experiment with the SimplifyLevel setting (currently no simplification is used) in order to reduce IMG file sizes and (possibly) rendering speed on GPS units.

All in all, I’m very pleased with results. I hope to be able to release the new version real soon!

GroundTruth ContoursGroundTruth Relief Contours

GroundTruth Relief Contours

Published by breki on 30 Mar 2009

Fresh Catch For March 30th

These are my new delicious links for March 30th:


Published by breki on 29 Mar 2009

Fresh Catch For March 29th

These are my new delicious links for March 29th:


Published by breki on 26 Mar 2009

GroundTruth And cGPSmapper 0098

He he he .....
Creative Commons License photo credit: Matthew Fang

UPDATE: there’s a temporary workaround for this problem suggested by cgpsmapper’s author, please read his comment below.

Looks like the latest 0098 version of cGPSmapper (more precisely its cpreview.exe) has a bug: cpreview breaks down when generating GroundTruth preview maps. I’ve reported the bug to cGPSmapper’s author, hopefully it will be fixed soon. In the meantime, I recommend using the previous version of cGPSmapper…

BTW: you can still generate main IMG files – the process breaks down after that. But you won’t be able to import maps into MapSource (well not automatically, anyway).

Published by breki on 26 Mar 2009

Fresh Catch For March 26th

These are my new delicious links for March 26th:


Published by breki on 25 Mar 2009

Fresh Catch For March 25th

These are my new delicious links for March 25th:


Published by breki on 24 Mar 2009

Fresh Catch For March 24th

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Published by breki on 23 Mar 2009

Fresh Catch For March 23rd

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