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I need to know the square footage of a long, curving private road with two irregularly shaped adjoining driveways. I've printed out a bird's eye view of the property with Google, used the exact known dimensions of a house in the photo to establish the scale, then made measurements as best I can on the photo, which indicates the road total is about 6,000 square feet (the red box is about 235' wide and 300' tall):

driveway

Is some kind of online tool available that will give me a more accurate estimate? For example, by outlining a region the tool will tell me the area? Even a "pixel painting" program that lets me do a flood-fill then tells me the number of pixels used would work.

Witness Protection ID 44583292
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2 Answers2

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Approximately 9,800 square feet, assuming your drawing is accurate. I hastily colored in the image using MS Paint (not perfect, since JPG compression added a bunch of fuzzy grayscale values).

Then using MATLAB with the image processing toolbox:

width = 235; % establish scale parameters
height = 300;
img = imread('areatest.jpg'); % read image in 
bwImg = im2bw(img,0.5); % convert from JPG to binary BW
% find black pixels, divide by total image area, 
% and scale to square footage depicted in drawing:    
dwArea = sum(sum(~bwImg))/numel(bwImg)*width*height;

You may be able to work this online, with the compile online website. However, I'm not sure if it can read in files from your hard drive.

Doresoom
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Using the histogram function in photoshop your white inside area is about 11% of the picture and if you include your black outline 12-13%. You can do the math from there.

DMoore
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    The 13% is fairly close to my answer - comes out to 9,165 sq. ft. Good to know there's another option cheaper than $3000/seat. – Doresoom Mar 31 '14 at 21:24
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    @Doresoom - Yea I said 12-13 and maybe even a tad over 13 actually because of the edges of the line aren't actually "black" and I might not have selected them. Well I am sure I didn't because I spent like 1 minute on it. I don't think I would get to 9800 but might be really close. – DMoore Mar 31 '14 at 21:27
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    Similarly, you can use the histogram function in GIMP. – derobert Apr 03 '14 at 21:55