Randomly generate a point within a country boundary polygon

Question

I'm interested in pulling street view data at random within a country.

I can only figure out how to generate a point within a bounding box. Often it pulls data from nearby nations. I'm using a GIS server right now, but I'm interested in removing it from the workflow since it's a pain.

Anybody know of any javascript mapping API that can randomly generate a point within a complex polygon, such as a country boundary?

Phil

Answer 1

I don't know of any practical algorithm to do this for an arbitrary, potentially-concave polygon, and still maintain uniform probability for each possible point.

(I mean, you could pick an axis crossing the polygon at random, find the crossing-points and pick a position from somewhere inside odd crossing-point-ranges. But that would leave some points more likely to be picked then others.)

I would go with the approach of picking a random point inside the rectangular bounding box, checking for collision against the country's vector data and generating another one on a miss.