As has been announced earlier in our blog, there are open thesis topics within the EU-project CAP4ACCESS. Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group is a project partner of CAP4ACCESS. Other project partners include UCL, Fraunhofer and sozialhelden.de with their wheelmap.org project.
The goal of CAP4ACCESS is to improve the accessibility of mobility-restricted people, in particular those who are wheelchair users. One of the tasks of the work packages pursued in Heidelberg is improving existing routing and navigation applications for the target user group. As all developed applications shall be openly accessible by the public, only free geodata, such as OpenStreetMap, is eligible.
However, the data completeness in OSM regarding features that are of importance for locomotion of wheelchair users, such as information on sidewalks, curbs and incline of surfaces is still poor in many regions.
We therefore aim to conduct two theses with the goal to improve this situation. Both topics may be adapted to the level of Bachelor, Master, Diploma, Teacher, etc.
The first topic is about using crowdsourced image interpretation to derive information on sidewalks (document in German).
The second topic is about automated derivation of road incline from GPS tracks collected by OpenStreetMap contributors (document in German).
Both topics are highly relevant from both a practical and a scientific point of view. If you are a student interested in these topics (Bachelor, Master, Teacher etc.) please contact Dr. Stefan Hahmann.