
Introducing OpenStreetView - progval
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/mvexel/diary/39274
======
andrewljohnson
Similar to [http://mapillary.com](http://mapillary.com).

It's great to see more open data like this, lots of uses for creating maps by
hand or even machine learning.

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mtrn
I haven't used mapillary, so just a question: is the user-generated content
made available to the public?

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hyperknot
To me it seems that OpenStreetView was made especially as an answer for
Mapillary. Mapillary has almost 80 million photos uploaded by enthusiasts, who
did it free charge.

Yet, even for a simple embed on a website, you have to pay them $99 / month.
Using the images for custom maps: $249 / month.

Accessing the data is not publicly available, but is probably in the range of
enterprise pricing options, only listed as "Contact Us". To me this seems to
be the opposite of the OSM model and there is a huge need for a OSV like
platform.

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kayvansylvan
Exactly. OSV is totally about being Open and free (as in both freedom and
price).

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toomuchtodo
Can OSV/OSM contribute the same resources to their project as Mapillary is
contributing to their own?

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Doctor_Fegg
Mapillary is VC-backed. OSV is backed by Telenav, a publicly traded location
services company. Your call as to which is the more sustainable model!

(The OSM Foundation has no connection with either project and is traditionally
focused on its core task of collecting and distributing openly-licensed vector
geodata.)

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rwmj
Very cool. OSM has been the default map on my phone for years. I do worry that
the name is a little close to Google's trademarked Street View (see list of
Google TMs here: [https://www.google.co.uk/permissions/trademark/trademark-
lis...](https://www.google.co.uk/permissions/trademark/trademark-list.html) ).
They might wish to avoid an unnecessary lawsuit by calling it something else.

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wtfishackernews
The name should be OK since there has already been an OpenStreetView since
2009.

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetView_(2009)](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetView_\(2009\))

~~~
boredpudding
Which could also be a name Google objects but just hasn't found out about yet.

Street View itself has been around since 2007.

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nixos
I understand that it's a volunteer effort, and volunteers don't have the
hardware required for even 180 degree view, but most pictures are taken out of
the front of the car, limiting its worth (2/3 of the picture is road, not the
houses on the side).

It would be more useful if people stuck two phones (one on each side of the
car) to take pictures of the passing buildings rather than road

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Brakenshire
Wonder whether you could use something like this:

[https://theta360.com/en/about/theta/s.html](https://theta360.com/en/about/theta/s.html)

Or whether there are any affordable 360 degree cameras which exist.

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Doctor_Fegg
Yes - there's the LG 360 Cam, which I've got and which is (generally) a lovely
bit of kit. The Ricoh Theta is similar though more expensive, and Samsung do
the Gear 360 but it's less pocketable.

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dbrgn
Exciting! Now instead of waiting for the street view car to pass through your
neighborhood, you can add the pictures yourself!

I wonder how privacy issues are handled though. Is any blurring of car numbers
or faces being done or planned?

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gruez
>Is any blurring of car numbers or faces being done or planned?

Why would that be necessary? All the pictures were taken in public so there's
no expectation of privacy.

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sgk284
That is a very American-centric privacy perspective and does not apply to most
of the world.

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majewsky
Freedom of panorama is quite widespread:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama)
(And it is expected that it will be part of the harmonized data protection law
that the EU is currently planning.)

Also, at least in Germany, the right to your own image does not apply when
"persons only appear as props next to a landscape or other location".
(Whatever that means is usually decided by the judge AFAIK.) Source:
[https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/kunsturhg/__23.html](https://www.gesetze-
im-internet.de/kunsturhg/__23.html)

~~~
detaro
The law in your second link explicitly spells out that this is only valid as
long as there is no "justified interest" of one of the people visible that the
image isn't published. Which is a pretty serious limitation, and basically
means you have to review and judge every image individually. In practice it's
explicitly not "happened in public, no expectation of privacy".

If you pay some attention you're probably going to be ok, but the "probably"
is the annoying thing for individual actors. (E.g. I think Google lost a few
lawsuits in Europe and Canada due to people being recognizable even with their
face blurred. Annoying and expensive for Google, a criminal conviction and
really expensive if it successfully hits an individual.)

Good thing for an open, collaborative project is that you are not Google and
can be more aggressive with filtering questionable images. Google seemed to
value having complete coverage of areas quite a bit, open projects don't have
to as much. Some data is better than none, and holes can be closed later, step
by step.

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ktta
This is pretty cool.

What would be _amazing_ to also have LIDAR sensors (EXPENSIVE! I know, I know)
which would really make amazing data for self driving/completely autonomous
vehicles; not only cars but also drones, etc.

Anyone know the pro/con for implementing LIDAR (although it maybe super late
before we have enough data for effective navigation at long distances), and if
it is worth it?

I think it would be really cool to have info about the heights of buildings,
exact positions of traffic lights, etc. which are miniscule but crucial for
low altitude drone navigation. Or can we infer almost everything from the
picture data?

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nitrogen
How can you ensure the data remains useful in the face of construction, tree
growth, and other changes? I think if we are to allow drones to fly
unsupervised, they will need to be limited to annotated environments (that is,
locally broadcasting navigation beacons) and will need full sensor suites
anyway.

~~~
ktta
Well the mapping frequency must be increased to account for stuff moving
around, but the data like height of buildings is not going to change a lot.
But I do get your point of the impracticality.

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opk
Interesting that some roads in Germany are covered, at least for now.

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detaro
The few I randomly clicked on seemed to be either tests without outside view
or with mostly-blurred faces and license plates (some unblurred, I suspect
where the face-detection failed), so there are efforts to conform with privacy
demands here.

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bla2
Google Street view also blurs faces and license plates. What killed it in
Germany was that some people wanted to be able to have their houses blurred
out, and processing these requests took lots of manual work.

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kuschku
The big issue was that Google had the cameras above eye height – German law
only allows panoramic images at eye level.

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netsharc
Google's fix for that should've been to genetically engineer a 3-meter tall
man. It's eye level for him!

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rmc
Germany has a history of "Let's make a new race of super humans, and presume
they are the default". So I don't think that argument will fly.

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twelvechairs
Props to the people who made this - fantastic public contribution. My big wish
list as someone who works in urban design and planning would be this paired
with 3d point cloud detection to make a 3d model of streets and spaces. Maybe
one day eh!

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akerro
As long as data is available to download by regions, streets etc and combined
data is freely available it will be possible.

You can do it already with Flickr. They provide metadata of images, you can
selected images from a map/region.

[http://www.popsci.com/gear-amp-
gadgets/article/2009-09/build...](http://www.popsci.com/gear-amp-
gadgets/article/2009-09/building-virtual-cities-automatically-150000-flickr-
photos)

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francium_
Some of the images appear to be upside down. Is this a known bug?

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maxerickson
It doesn't seem to be in their tracker. Mapillary had a similar problem, it
turns out that the camera API was updated to provide the orientation sensor
orientation and they were using the older API on a phone with a rotated
sensor.

[https://github.com/openstreetview](https://github.com/openstreetview)

[https://fadlotech.blogspot.de/2015/11/the-reason-why-
nexus-5...](https://fadlotech.blogspot.de/2015/11/the-reason-why-nexus-5x-has-
photo.html)

[https://github.com/mapillary/mapillary_issues/issues/1929](https://github.com/mapillary/mapillary_issues/issues/1929)

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astrostl
Every huge entity having their own mapping system in order to grind out a
minor efficiency is probably the biggest tragedy, to me, in modern services.
Before mapping, it would be the TLS certificate racket, which LetsEncrypt
appears to have dead to rights.

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stelonix
What I've wondered for a while is the feasibility of producing streetview
imagery with drones. It seems to be the perfect solution for distributed
street shooting.

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ashitlerferad
Anyone know what the business models of Telenav and OSV are?

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boise
Automotive and ads [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/telenav-reports-fourth-
quarter...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/telenav-reports-fourth-quarter-
fiscal-201500248.html)

