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Comment by TACIXAT | Hacker News Reader

I've built a site to pay people for images and annotations. [1] I'm trying to onboard my first paid users right now. The plan is to build out a high quality 50k image license plate recognition dataset as a proof of concept.

Right now we own all of the datasets on the site and the idea is to license them out to companies while making them available to researchers under a non-commercial license. The market might take it a different direction to be more of a marketplace or Github style hosting. Email in bio if anyone wants to chat about this.

Also, if anyone wants to get paid 10 cents an image to take pictures of North American license plates, get in touch. Need about 1000 from each state. It's probably below most people's pay grade on here but there is a whole reverse bidding system, so you can always bid higher than 10 cents. Some user studies with a shared screen would be super helpful as well.

1. https://mekabytes.com

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"Also, if anyone wants to get paid 10 cents an image to take pictures of North American license plates, get in touch."

Your blatant disregard for privacy is shocking, but perhaps unsurprising in the field. I guess you also didn't through the enormous risks for the photographer.

Wow, interesting project. Not sure how many people you can entice into providing 10k photos of license plates, firearms, and children in pools. I kid, but are you building an alert system for a superhero?

Ha! It is a bit public safety focused right now. The first two I will really build out (read: pay people to help with) are license plate recognition and vehicle make/model/year identification. I think those have a decent market.

The firearms one is tricky and I'm not sure it will ever be licensed commercially since we don't own the footage that the images are taken from. Valuable dataset in terms of what it could provide though, like an early warning system for active shooters.

Some day I'll have enough free time and just make a billiards dataset to help me find shots.

Have a good look at privacy laws in the states/countries of your users, in some things like this may be against the law or subject to restrictions. See:

https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/automated-...

Thank you! That's honestly very helpful.

You're welcome & much good luck with your project!

Unattended security gates at a local campground are being used to gather data. To get access to the campground, you have to provide your plate number, vehicle make & model, and vehicle color. The gate only checks for the plate number, but the images captured can be used to build out a vehicle make/model ML model.

Maybe partner with such a system to gather your data?

I have several thousand images of vehicles on the roadway and parking lots that I used to understand the backend ML of an ALPR system. Selecting cameras was the most difficult part of the project. I did not attempt to determine the make/model. My patience for labeling had worn too thin.

Overall, as invasive as ALPR system are, the cat has long left the bag. I doubt the cat will ever return.

Hey there, just checked out the site and signed up. I’m not seeing anything about how to get paid for uploads. Can you provide some direction here? Thanks!

It is a little hidden still. On your profile page there should be a sign up link that will take you to Stripe. Feel free to email me. I will post two solicitations tomorrow, one for annotation work and one for plate photographs.

It is restricted to US only right now (Stripe setting) but I will change that if there is non-US interest and the country is supported.

I've only run through the whole process once so hopefully there are no hiccups. Thank you!

What is the cost for each dataset for commercial uses?

We haven't figured out commercial pricing yet. It may be a scale based on company revenue. Targeting bigger businesses though, it will be less than it would cost to develop the model independently, but likely trying to target low 5 figures.

The datasets are also available and a non-commercial Creative Commons license. You can pay $5 for a download and rehost it elsewhere, or just wait for me to upload it to Kaggle or Hugging Face

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