Poster Sessions

TECH -3

Wen Cheng

W. Cheng, G. Pearson

Algorithm Developed to Make More Reliable Links to Better Photographic Views of Nursing Homes for Prototype \"Nursing Home Screener\" Web Site

To facilitate screening American nursing homes by location and quality, we are developing a website that uniquely shows multiple homes as rank markers on a Google Map. We want also to see photos of the homes, ones that are more informative than provided by the standard three Views. Our prototype offers a hyperlink to Microsoft Maps Live from each home marker, so that "bird's-eye" views (i.e., moderately close-up "45 degree" aerial views) can be shown if available. Such linking is often unsuccessful in reaching a home's image, due to format mismatch of either the home name or address between the two mapping systems. We have developed a preprocessing algorithm that recognizes such a failure and attempts to overcome it. If a reliable link is found, it then detects whether a bird's-eye view is available. (If not, the hyperlink is suppressible.) Four types of unsuccessful links are detected: "Blank", "Pink Box", "Yellow Box", and "Multiple Addresses". We present the nature of each failure type, our solutions, and the degree of improvement found. How we determine bird's-eye availability is described, and the coverage of bird's-eyes for all US homes estimated. Finally, open issues and further research are discussed.