should we display the AOI by default ?

[12rambau]

We were in a webinar this morning with ECOWAS (@lecrabe, @yfinegold) and participants did an unexpected thing.

Small reproductible example

Start a Classification work. You have all the basic parameters sets (image, legend, some points) and you start collecting extra samples. For this purpose, you decide to display complementary information like google High res imagery in the right panel.

issue

Once you've set up everything, for the side with Google imagery the AOI is not visible by default. Consequence: some of our user created points where there is no actual data in the initial image.

question

Do you think it would make sense to always display the AOI to avoid people forgeting it ?

live demo

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/12596392/144420710-ab698acd-4cb1-4b0b-be65-077451bd618d.mov

[cdanielw]

Rendering feature layers are pretty slow in EE, and the more complex they are, the slower they render. There is a maximum number of concurrent map tile requests we can make to EE. A user displaying four maps inside Sepal, with the AOI layer enabled on each one of them, will have the actual image tiles load noticeable slower compared to when the AOI layers are disabled. The AOI layers complete with the image layers, for the available concurrent tile requests.

Google did recently announce that they are working on speeding up rendering of features. I suggest we wait until Google implemented these improvements, then re-evaluate this.

A completely different approach to the problem encountered is to notify the user when data is collected outside of the AOI. That takes some thinking on how to best implement though...

[12rambau]

Understood, as users are already complaining about the loading speed, let's not overload the Google rendering.

On the other hand, notifying the user would be perfect, because even with the AOI I can still click outside the borders and then I need to remove my point which is not very easy for beginners (they need to take care of the pointer moving from crosshair to hand to crosshair again). If you think it's feasible that sounds like the best approach to me.

I'll try to be as precise as possible when I'll start documenting Classification

[cdanielw]

Reference data outside of your AOI doesn't seem to cause any issues - as far as I've seen. Did the users have any problems?

[12rambau]

it's not causing issues, it's just useless ;-)

So they can be surprised not seeing any improvement even though they added 30 points outside the classification area

[cdanielw]

That makes sense.