Ask HN: Is it possible to write a program to scan the blue seas for MH370?
Just heard in the news that the search for the missing MH370 has now shifted 3000kms to the south west of Perth. I wonder if somebody can write a script that can scan the blue seas across the Indian ocean and adjoining seas to come up with all locations that are not blue in color. Yes, there will be a lot of false positives like ships and other debris, but if we can use this script to reduce the workload to a few thousand datapoints, we should once for all know if the plane crashed or is now elsewhere.
And clouds, and wave caps, and noise in the input data, and natural variations in ocean color... I think your estimate of the number of false positives is off by several orders of magnitude.
Makes sense. In that case, would scanning the sea for hues of red work? The MH370 has a pretty prominent red strip along its body. If we can scan for this color, then it could be a more practical search.