MapSense

Imagine being able to capture whole roads in just a few clicks.
Find every house on a map - the easy way!

Overview
MapSense is an intelligent, semi-automatic, raster map digitising tool. MapSense provides a number of tools to selectively capture vector data from maps. It is fast and easy to use, and provides many different features to tune the digitising process to best fit your data. Here are two quick examples of MapSense capturing houses and a river.

Once happy with the digitised results, the data can be exported to the industry standard Drawing Exchange Format (DXF). These files can be easily imported into all mainstream GIS and graphics packages.

Usage

MapSense operates using a familiar idea of a project, which contains and image to digitise and various digitising groups. Each digitising group has a set parameters controlling what to capture from the map.

Digitising group's can capture point or line data. These two types of group have many properties that allow you to tune the digitising process so that it accurately captures your data. Each group has a number of 'valid colours' that will be picked by MapSense when digitising.

Point Groups - Houses, etc
A point group will capture pixel data from the map. Any pixel matching one of the groups's valid colours is collected. After valid all pixels have been found MapSense can apply a grouping algorithm to reduce the number or points returned. This group can also be tuned to not pick up lone pixels appearing when you really want those that are in small sets.

Line Groups - Roads, Rivers, etc
A line group consists of a number of key nodes. These are positioned by the user to specify where to begin and end digitising a line. In addition extra key nodes are used to control directions taken at junctions. Link nodes can be used to force MapSense to skip problem areas such as large gaps in the line.
The digitising algorithm used to capture a line is very flexible and can be tuned in numerous ways to best fit the line being captured. If using a reasonably fast computer (1GHz+) you can use the Automatic-Digitising feature. This allows you to see in real-time the affect moving key nodes, etc has on the captured data.
A line group can also be set to capture a looped object by toggling the 'Make Polygon' option. This will cause MapSense to continue past the end key node and keep digitising back to the start node, forming a closed loop.

Want to more? Download the free demo of MapSense today and try it out!