Mapsnap Automatically Georeferences Historic Sanborn Insurance Maps

Mapsnap: Automated Georeferencing for Historic Sanborn Insurance Maps

I built mapsnap, a program that automatically georeferences historic Sanborn insurance maps. It uses EasyOCR to detect street labels, extrapolates intersections, and applies RANSAC to find a robust fit against OpenStreetMap. The tool handles noisy detections well, even with over 50% outliers, but struggles with curved streets, short names, and renamed roads. This makes historic maps searchable and usable for projects like OldNYC.