I'm interested in pulling street view data at random within a country.
I can only figure out how to generate a point within a bounding box. Often it pulls data from nearby nations. I'm using a GIS server right now, but I'm interested in removing it from the workflow since it's a 开发者_运维问答pain.
Anybody know of any javascript mapping API that can randomly generate a point within a complex polygon, such as a country boundary?
Phil
I don't know of any practical algorithm to do this for an arbitrary, potentially-concave polygon, and still maintain uniform probability for each possible point.
(I mean, you could pick an axis crossing the polygon at random, find the crossing-points and pick a position from somewhere inside odd crossing-point-ranges. But that would leave some points more likely to be picked then others.)
I would go with the approach of picking a random point inside the rectangular bounding box, checking for collision against the country's vector data and generating another one on a miss.
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