UK's map maker Ordnance Survey plays with robo roof detector

Britain's map maker is demonstrating that machine learning isn't all hot air – but has discovered just how much donkey work is involved. The Ordnance Survey set up an ML experiment to identify roofs from its remote sensing data (satellite and aerial imagery), and found the trial reached 87 per cent accuracy within a week, from a standing start. That's still less accurate than humans (at 95 per cent), but that's not the point – it could process thousands in the time it takes a human to do one. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to classify this roof..." [Source: Ordnance Survey] "It does have the potential to revolutionise our operations," an OS spokesman enthused. The week-long prototype isn't ready for deployment because it isn't yet accurate enough, but it promises to accelerate visual data analysis.