OSM centerlines: two days after

In this last two days I've been expanding osm-centerlines. Now it not only supports ways more complex than a simple rectangle, but also ones that lead to 'branches' (unfortunately, most probably because the mapper either imported bad data or mapped it himself). Still, I tested it in very complex polygons and the result is not pretty. There is still lots of room for improvements.

Unluckily, it's not as stand alone as it could be. The problem is that, so far, the algos force you to provide now only the polygon you want to process, but also its skeleton and medial. The code extends the medial using info extracted from the skeleton in such a way that the resulting medial ends on a segment of the polygon, hopefully the one(s) that cross from one riverbank to another at down and upstream. Calculating the skeleton could be performed by CGAL, but the current Python binding doesn't include that function yet. As for the medial, SFCGAL (a C++ wrapper for CGAL) exports a function that calculates an approximative medial, but there seem to be no Python bindings for them yet.

So, a partial solution would be to use PostGIS-2.2's ST_StraightSkeleton() and ST_ApproximateMedialAxis(), so I added a function called skeleton_medial_from_postgis(). The parameters are a psycopg2 connection to a PostgreSQL+PostGIS database and the way you want to calculate, as a shapely.geometry, and it returns the skeleton and the medial ready to be fed into extend_medials(). The result of that should be ready for mapping.

So there's that. I'll be trying to improve it in the next days, and start looking into converting it into a JOSM plugin.