Openly Licensed Streetview with Panoramax | Hacker News Reader

Openly Licensed Streetview with Panoramax

tzovar.as

106 pointsmaelito31 comments

In case you wonder, Panoramax instances are 100 % French for now. Even if the OSM-FR instance can be used for photos outside of France, don't expect yet to see lots of international photos on it. It takes time to communicate and convince people it's a good idea.

In France though, a few months ago, there was not really more than one big french city (Strasbourg) captured in 360°.

Now, more than ten big cities have interesting coverage. Check out this link to see a map of all the 360° photos https://api.panoramax.xyz/#focus=map&map=7.33/47.583/0.742&p...

In fact, lots of municipalities already have 360° photos of their streets... sleeping on their servers.

Interesting fact : in France, public funded administrations must open their data, by law, exceptions aside.

Disclaimer : I'm not working on the Panoramax project, but plugged it on https://cartes.app/?choix+du+style=oui&rue=oui#6.67/47.493/2... (https://github.com/laem/cartes), the French open source alternative to Google Maps, which is in dire need of good quality 360° photos !

They don't make it easy to contribute to the project...

Between only French forum, French FAQ on the website (English website) and dead links...it's...uhm

It's a french project funded in part by the french government and the only current instances are for french contributors. They actually make it pretty easy to contribute... for the people that will contribute in France.

Give it time, it seems really new. I discovered its existence at a local OSM gathering just this Monday. I was so happy.

Perhaps relevant to this subject, there are now <$400 three-band GNSS compass receivers (e.g. two three band receivers in a single unit so you can run two antennas with a meter or two baseline and get accurate headings in addition to position), based on the Unicorecomm UM982 chipset. E.g. https://www.ardusimple.com/product/simplertk3b-compass/ (There are other vendors, but I've done business with this one before)

I mention it because for imaging, small heading errors have way more impact on where you're looking than small position errors but single antenna gps doesn't really give you headings except with assumptions from motion.

I've got one sitting in a box here, haven't tried it out yet but plan to soon...

At least in the instance I've used, my pictures end up published with a link to my personal OSM account, and with the full dump of Exif data coming from my camera (including bits that are irrelevant for this kind of picture). This has privacy implications. Caveat emptor.

The only coverage in the entire southeastern US is a gas station in Alabama. It's an interesting project but "openly licensed streetview" is overselling it by several football fields in any country.

OpenStreetMap started as a blank canvas before we made it. This isn't about some dataset you can freely pillage, it's about an open platform you can use to create our streetview.

Huge difference though : one person with a car and some energy can panoramax-map most of a city in one day.

The same cannot be said of one person in one day for mapping the data on OSM.

Expect Panoramax to grow way faster than OSM :)

That doesn't really address my comment, which was about the framing in the blog post. It's not an openly licensed Street View. It's not even an openly licensed Street Side (Bing). It isn't even close to an openly licensed Panoramio.

It has the potential, but framing sets expectations and mine were not met. This is feedback for the author and anyone around the project trying to come up with a pitch. Focus on what it could be, don't try to say it is something it isn't (yet).

There are currently only 2 panoramax instances. One from IGN (french "National Geographic Institute) and one from the french OSM charter.

This is obvious by looking at the coverage the world. France it where the majority of the coverage is. The coverage of most cities is actually pretty impressive for a young project.

While the UI and coverage is not necessarily on par with street view, it's still pretty usable in France.

Secondly Panoramax is first built for OSM contributors/mappers, not for end users. The blog reflects this in the tldr: "If you are interested in contributing"

You know this site is about startups, right? Literally every startup pitch is about what they hope to eventually create, it's not about what they actually have now.

It is good to see an alternative with a friendly license.

As storage gets cheaper I would like to see seasonal as well as night/day images for streetview photography.

So if i wanted to buy a good setup to contribute to this what should i buy? The faq andd doxumentation appear to be in french.

The recommanded setup is a GoPro Max.

Indeed the guide is only in French for now... https://panoramax.fr/comment-participer-a-panoramax/guide-co...

I tried offering the author of this to publish a huge dataset on it and he seemed oddly uninterested.

Hi, which "author" (it's a French gov funded project), and which dataset ?

Out of curiosity, could you describe the data set here?

They should import data from Mapillary as I see the whole of South Africa is missing. Although most libre licensed products have poor image quality; I hope that improves.

Some French cities have good quality 360° pictures https://api.panoramax.xyz/#focus=pic&map=20/48.580583/7.7418...

One user coded a script to download your mapillary images and reupload them on panoramax https://forum.geocommuns.fr/t/outil-mapillary-download-pour-...

Kinda hijacking the thread but... My hypothesis is that we will look back and see that Streetview imagery is a goldmine for AI and will be a path to being able to answer HARD questions about the real world.

The insane thing is there are only like 7 companies that actually have meaningful datasets.

I spent 1.5 years studying the geospatial space and went so far as buying a Mosaic51 and scanning the entire country of Andorra as a test before looking at buying the camera manufacture.

Ultimately I walked away from buying the company after issues with the family office I was working with... but long story short I believe streetview imagery will be a gold mine in the future.

If anyone is working in the space. Feel free to ping me, happy to chat and even make intros to the space. If you are training an AI, ping me as well. Happy to open my images up to the right person to make something "country scale" (160k images... every 3 meters with RTK labeled gnss data).

Anyone who uses a bike to get around will know the routine of streetviewing their route ahead of time to see how dangerous it is, if the bike lanes are, in fact, real, etc.

I also have a real estate project and want to work on AI analysis of local streetview to learn about the neighbourhood.

I've wanted to build something to automate this with AI but haven't had time.

I would love to chat!

I have always wondered if/when Google will start using their streetview data to improve mapping. They could (in theory) generate directions like "turn left after the green building" and find speed limits, road surface, width, and potentially even bus routes and stuff like that. They don't seem to, though. The routes they generate are always incredibly naive when it comes to actual road type, like "let's go up this single track road with a 20% gradient to save 2 minutes".

Curious whether you think this is more than just improving mapping/routing related stuff, though.

They do use streetview data to improve mapping, particularly for things like speed limits (like you mentioned) and other signage (street names, identifying which intersections have stop signs, etc.)

> "let's go up this single track road with a 20% gradient to save 2 minutes"

Not sure this is a good example : elevation data should be good enough to avoid this kind of roads. See e.g. https://sonny.4lima.de for Europe.

For your general thought, see here : https://blog.google/products/maps/google-maps-101-how-we-map...

> It all starts with imagery

> Street View and satellite imagery have long been an important part of how we’re able to identify where places are in the world—it shows us where roadways, buildings, addresses and businesses are located in a region, in addition to other important details—such as the town’s speed limits or business names.

So I guess what you're proposing is already done for several years but in more subtle ways.

Remember that Google Maps doesn't have the power of OSM. Hence the need for automation.

> Not sure this is a good example : elevation data should be good enough to avoid this kind of roads.

I'm not sure elevation data is enough, nor is speed limit. In many places, like the Cotswolds, the main route includes a 20% gradient. The difference is the road will be wide with overtaking lanes etc. and often a reduced speed limit. Then you have places like Devon where there are national speed limit (the highest) roads with such poor visibility they are best avoided unless you have no other choice. I find it's hard to know what the quality or "character" of a road will be until you actually get there, but Google seems to treat them all equally.

I did a project that attempts to generate these types of instructions: https://map2seq.schumann.pub/nllni/demo/

> generate directions like "turn left after the green building"

I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the Los Angeles metro area, Google Maps already gives directions like this. "Turn left after the Carl's Jr.", "Turn right after the Starbucks". I notice it's usually done in areas where street signs are hard to see, but there is a clear landmark for the driver e.g. the golden arches of a McDonald's.

To be clear, streetview was originally built to improve mapping. You can thank the wealth of street names and address labels on streetview.

Indeed. Google is a crawler, not only of the digital world.

"Crawling the physical web".

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/cityblock/

The team behind Panoramax is already applying AI analysis. See e.g. https://forum.openstreetmap.fr/t/detection-des-stationnement...

Most Panoramax discussions are in French, but you'll find links to English code.

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