Jan 19, 2009
Heatmap from AIS data
What do you do with more than 25 gigabyte of compressed AIS data? You play around with it, load it into databases (and wait over a day for an index to get generated), do some funky .kmz files or you generate heatmaps, like this one to the right.
It shows AIS traffic for the UK and northern Europe during 24 hours. You can clearly see the high traffic zones. The original algorithm is not by me (and unfortunately the whole code is in the office, so the attribution will follow tomorrow) but I tweaked it a little bit.
The whole thing is quite memory consuming (the original rendering size was 4000×2000 pixels) and at the moment the .NET Garbage Collector and I are not a good team. I would re-implement it in C (maybe even with proj4 support?) but I first need to read about some drawing algorithms.
