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I’m continually jealous of the street view dataset and disappointed there’s no public/free alternative.

They provide API access but it’s very hamstrung and extremely expensive, making it essentially useless for anything except pulling up a single image of a location. It’s useless for any real mapping/localization/analysis project.

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There’s Mapillary (acquired by meta but imagery is free to use in most cases) and KartaView (Grab).

Both are crowdsourced platforms.

https://www.mapillary.com/ https://kartaview.org/landing

I didn't know about these!

Still, since they're crowd-sourced from phone data, they only have a single view (no 360 in most places), inaccurate (or at least not reliably accurate) camera calibration, no accurate localization, and possibly most importantly, no LiDAR data.

That's a lot of things that make it much harder to deal with and limit the potential compared to street view.

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