An AI that makes road maps from aerial images

Gaps in maps are a problem, particularly for systems being developed for self-driving cars. To address the issue, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have created RoadTracer, an automated method to build road maps that's 45 percent more accurate than existing approaches. Using data from aerial images, the team says that RoadTracer is not just more accurate, but more cost-effective than current approaches. MIT professor Mohammad Alizadeh says that this work will be useful both for tech giants like Google and for smaller organizations without the resources to curate and correct large amounts of errors in maps. "RoadTracer is well-suited to map areas of the world where maps are frequently out of date, which includes both places with lower population and areas where there's frequent construction," says Alizadeh, one of the co-authors of a new paper about the system.