Building the Tools to Show Us the Way: How Mapillary is Ramping up Traffic Sign Recognition Globally
Last year I wrote a blog post when we hit 10 million photos, to mark the date and thank everyone who helped us get there together. Today, we just passed 100 million.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles to do some research on time travel. After a couple of weeks of work on design and implementation, we arrived at time travel the Mapillary way.
We’re incredibly excited to join University of California Berkeley’s DeepDrive initiative to help push computer vision and deep learning forward. This, we hope, will improve understanding of street images for safer cities, autonomous cars, and better maps.
Two months ago I wrote a longer update on Mapillary and OpenStreetMap for the State of the Map US conference in Seattle. A lot has happened since, so I wanted to share a short OpenStreetMap-related update in time for State of the Map in Brussels.
Today we're launching a community mapping pilot with HERE, the global provider of map data and services. We’re excited to welcome fans of MapCreator, HERE’s community tool for editing maps, and hope we can help each other in our mapping projects.
Meet Elliott, Mapillary Ambassador from Baltimore, USA. Elliott is a geographic informations systems consultant and is passionate about maps, open data, and photography. He thinks Mapillary is at the intersection of all three of those passions. He enjoys adding photos to Mapillary in support of efforts to improve navigational directions and local points of interest information. Elliott is a regular contributor to OpenStreetMap, a Maryland Open Data Council appointee and a military veteran. He is also active on Twitter @talllguy.
Happy Parks & Recreation Month! The Westchester County GIS team has been photo-mapping up a storm.
Redesigning and reimplementing Mapillary turned out to be an unprecedented project in the life of the company, as we basically rebuilt everything from scratch. We started from the ground up: first, we built a new tiler, which allowed us to actually show each photo in a sequence, just like beads on a string. We then asked ourselves if it would be possible to use Mapillary on the full screen map/photo at all times?
This week we’re going to State of the Map US in Seattle and we’re looking forward to connect with both old and new friends from this vibrant open community.
Almost 60 years ago, Saalumarada Thimmakka started the quest to create greenness around her home area in India. Today, the results are captured on OpenStreetMap and Mapillary. In this guest blog post Chethan H A tells the story.
Our goal at Mapillary is to change the world — at least, to change the way we capture our world and record that representation. So we’re excited to announce this week that we’ve been honored by the World Economic Forum as one of their 2016 Technology Pioneers, a selection of the world’s most innovative early-stage companies.
Here at Mapillary, many of us like cycling. Apparently, it’s not just us but our awesome community as well. In celebration of National Bike Month we thought we would check on cyclists of Mapillary to reveal where in the world they use their bikes to photo map places they care about.
The first stretch of the new light rail in Rio de Janeiro (VLT Carioca) opens up today. The 28-km system connects the port region with the city's financial district and Santos Dumont Airport, and is scheduled for completion in time for the 2016 Olympics. Arlindo Pereira writes about his sneak preview of the inaugural ride. This blog was first published on Medium.
Mapillary community members have captured and shared millions of photos with the world. You might have seen some spectacular examples on our Instagram and in our newsletters. We'd like to announce a new way to discover great photos on Mapillary in the official Mapillary Chrome extension! Every time you open a new tab you'll see a beautiful photo from Mapillary. You'll also be able to experience walking around these photos thanks to MapillaryJS. Just hit "Explore".
We at Mapillary are great fans of OpenStreetMap and are very happy to see that Mapillary is a useful tool for map editing. With Mapillary you can capture street photos when you walk, ride your bike or drive. Once you upload the photos to Mapillary they are available for map editing on OpenStreetMap. The photos are useful for capturing features you can’t see on satellite imagery like building information, road conditions, traffic signs etc. By nature, it's often the most up-to-date source of reliable information on the ground.
The latest component in a growing list extending the functionality of MapillaryJS exposes an API and functionality for photo tagging. With the tagging component we are adding support for displaying, creating and editing tags.
#MapatónxGuajira is an initiative from OpenStreetMap Colombia and it is also supported by several tech communities from all over Colombia. We are really excited to support this initiative and to share their story of testing different tools for humanitarian mapping. Thank you Fredy Rivera, Juan Carlos Pachón, Carlos Felipe Castillo, Leonardo Gutierrez, Miguel Sanchez and all other people involved in the mapping project in Colombia. This is a translated version of Juan Carlos Pachón's post. Juan Carlos Pachónwho is a volunteer for OpenStreetMap Colombia.
Our community member and Mapillary Ambassador @talllguy is a passionate photo mapper. He brings Mapillary in his car, on his bike and on his runs. He has captured almost 250,000 photos (!) in Maryland, U.S. Last weekend he brought Mapillary on a nine mile hike through three of America's national parks. Here's his #MapYourPark story.
Photo-mapping in Old Havana (Photo credit:@dicepb)
This week in Mexico City, Mapillary had the opportunity to participate in a walk through the city center as part of the 3rd edition of Liga Peatonal, a non-profit organization in Mexico that promotes better infrastructure for pedestrians.
Meet Jean-Louis, Mapillary Ambassador from Orange, France. Jean-Louis works at the local government and is a board member of OpenStreetMap France. He likes to use slippy maps that gather several sources of information (like OpenStreetMap, Flickr, Mapillary). Examples are Lizmobility, which is a map to show accessibility, and OpenLevelup, which allows to do micromapping on several floors. He is also active on Twitter @JLZIMMERMANN.
A couple of months ago, we added support for Garmin cameras in the iOS app, and early adopters have shown that it produces amazing photos and sequences. Today we are adding support for multiple Garmin cameras. This means that you can create flexible "camera rigs" so that you can capture more than one direction. With four cameras, you can capture 360 degrees at the same time and don't have to drive the same route as often.
The U.S. National Park Service is celebrating 100 years and to support their work we invite you to bring Mapillary to your closest national park and tell your story with the #FindYourPark and #MapYourPark campaign. Some of our community members have already done some mapping and we got the opportunity to talk to Canadarunner who took Mapillary with him on his roadtrip to the national parks.
Bombax ceiba or Semal in Hindi, the flowers bloom in February-March followed by fruit pods which contain cotton balls.
We are excited to finally announce that we are part of GoPro's new Developer Program, which was unveiled yesterday at Pier 35 in San Francisco. The program includes more than 100 developers, and we were selected along with 33 other companies to showcase our integration at the launch expo yesterday. It was a busy day showing off how easy our integration lets Mapillary members capture using GoPro cameras. We also met some of the other developers in the program and many GoPro engineers.
National Park Week, April 16 to 24, 2016, is America’s largest celebration of national heritage. It is the perfect time to discover national parks and a great thing is that you can do it at no cost as every national park offers you free admission for the full week. Each park also arranges a lot of activities so make sure to stay updated on yours.
Meet Shravan, Mapillary Ambassador from Ahmedabad, India. Shravan is an urban researcher at the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology University. He is an active contributor on OSM. He was inspired to start using Mapillary by how Google was not allowed to do their Street View project in India. He makes it a point to contribute to Mapillary whenever on a trip or just randomly driving or biking around town. He co-organizes Maptime and Datameet events in India, encouraging people to use Mapillary and improve OSM. He is also active on Twitter @shravanshah.
In 1916, the US National Park Service (NPS) was created to oversee land that had been protected with national park status. Today, the NPS is responsible for more than 84 million acres, which includes areas such as historic sites and monuments, in addition to parks like Yellowstone. This year, the NPS is celebrating its 100th birthday by encouraging people to explore local sites that are part of the National Park System and then share their stories with the #FindYourPark campaign. It’s a beautiful initiative that showcases how the NPS protects areas of all shapes and sizes.
The component based architecture of our open source library MapillaryJS makes it easy to extend with new functionality that is independent from the logic of other elements. Inspired by the historical image comparisons created by @neogeografen we decided to build our own slider component.
Meet Nuno, Mapillary Ambassador from Madeira, Portugal. Nuno is a geographer, photographer and an avid OpenStreetMap contributor. He uses Mapillary to more easily map on OSM. He is also active on Twitter @iamnunocaldeira and shares his amazing photography on Instagram.
Last week Ciarán, our community member who is very involved in #MapLesotho visited Portmarnock Community School. The objective with they day was to show the students (who already are experienced with OpenStreetMap) how to use a mobile phone to help with mapping. As we got very excited about Mapillary being used in schools we asked Ciarán to tell us a bit about his day.
Meet Katie, Mapillary Ambassador from Portland, USA. Katie is an advocate for safe walking and a recent OpenSource GIS convert. She's on a mission to encourage smart coders and policy makers to rebuild the urban landscape, particularly with regard to the walkway network: sidewalks, curb ramps, connections to urban trails... Katie's doings can also be followed on Twitter @rbracket.
To commemorate International Women's Day, we teamed up with travel information startup GeoSure to showcase the top 20 cities in the world, ranked by safety for women.
We just closed an $8 million Series A financing round to enable us to expand. Last year was an incredible year for our community and for Mapillary as a company but we still have a long way to go to realize our vision of visually mapping the world. With this investment, we are in a great position to go all the way. Atomico led this round, with participation from our previous backers Sequoia, LDV Capital, Playfair, and Wellington.
We’ve learned a lot from cities and municipal services since we released Mapillary for ArcGIS back in October last year. FedGIS this week was one of the first opportunities to engage with GIS professionals at the state and national level. Here’s what we took away from the conference:
When Google's Street View cameras made headlines last week after being spotted at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, Mickey Mouse aficionados rejoiced at the prospect of seeing their favorite landmarks come to life with street level photos. However, lucky for them, photos like this already exist on Mapillary.
At the second event of Maptime Copenhagen, Mapillary Amabassador Søren introduced us to geocoding historical images and uploading them to Mapillary. This provides a great way to experience time travelling in the Mapillary viewer!
Between traffic congestion, hurried pedestrians, and natural wear and tear, major cities are plagued with numerous road safety issues. To spur dialog about these issues, the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) and OpenGov Hub will be hosting a Vision Zero hackathon in Washington D.C. on February 13.
Not long ago, we added support for GoPro® cameras in the iOS app, and early adopters have shown it produces amazing photos and sequences. Now we add support for GoPro® Hero3 as well as Garmin® VirbX/VirbXE and also introduce a high-speed mode using the time-lapse feature of these action cameras.
In the second week of February Mapillary is traveling to Maseru, Lesotho, as part of the #MapLesotho initiative in collaboration with Fingal County Council. There we will be holding workshops dedicated to giving Lesotho’s Physical Planners better knowledge about the potential of using Mapillary to help improve maps and infrastructure.
We kickstarted 2016 with an event in Mexico. This time the city of Guadalajara hosted a Citizenship Cartography event. Thanks to the support of the local authorities of Jalisco, the OpenStreetMap Mexico community and also civic hackers from Codeando Mexico where at hand to map the streets of Guadalajara.
At the last Esri User Conference, I met an environmental consultant who worked on a project verifying fire hydrant locations for a small town. He checked out each coordinate on Google Street View -- “by hand!” he insisted, referring to restrictions on using the Google Maps API for deriving datasets and asset tracking. He hadn’t minded the laborious process so much as an unexpected problem: Street View was neither current nor complete. Street View cars had driven through the town over three years ago, and hadn’t captured smaller streets and hiking trails.
It’s not often one gets to hit up a friend in Antarctica for a favor. When I heard my friend Ed Young was out there, I jumped at the opportunity to ask him to do a Mapillary walk. Sometime in the course of Antarctic mountaineering and running Ice Marathons, Ed squeezed this in.
We love GoPro® cameras. These tiny action cameras create stunning, quality images. They have a wide field of view and can capture up to two photos every second, making them perfect when you're creating Structure from Motion, like we are with our 3D Navigation tool. Also, they are easy to mount on pretty much anything.
This is a guest post by Beata Felix Rutabingwa from the World Bank. The World Bank has been using Mapillary, a crowdsourcing photo app that maps the world with street level photos, to chart Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, in a project called Dar Ramani Huria. This community-based mapping project trains university students and local community members to create highly accurate maps of the most flood-prone areas of the city.
The Mapillary Walk competition has drawn to a close. Over the course of the competition we’ve seen walks submitted from around the world, from beaches in Rio de Janeiro to snowy fields in Sweden. The underlying purpose of #MapillaryWalk has been to encourage people to share their favorite places, using stunning photos to tell a story of why the place is special to them.
Mapillary works hard to make cities smarter. We’ve spent a lot of time perfecting our uploading capabilities, automatic GIS integration and our traffic sign detection - and it’s paid off. 4YFN (4 Years From Now), a business platform focused on connecting global startups, selected us as the best business in the Smart City Industry.
At Mapillary, we don’t want to simply show you photos on maps – we want you to feel immersed in whichever landscape you’re exploring. Behind-the-scenes, we have been 3D reconstructing every location our members photograph and now, we want to show you. We're giving our community the power to virtually explore their photos like never before.
Over the last few months Fingal County Council and mappers in Lesotho have been working hard to create an accurate base map of the country on OpenStreetMap. With vastly better maps, the planning and delivery of services and facilities across Lesotho such as healthcare and education can be greatly improved.
Consumer spherical cameras are coming. Some, like the Ricoh Theta, are already here. This means that it is now possible for individuals to capture spherical images massively. Preparing for that, we are now enabling pano navigation mode.
Recently Mapzen launched Mapzen Search. It is a search engine for places worldwide, fully powered by open data and freely available to everyone.
Today we're pleased to announce the release of Mapillary for ArcGIS!
Every day we are amazed and thankful to our community members for taking us to places we have never seen before. When we in the morning check into the Mapillary world there is always something exciting and surprising to discover. We think this is amazing and wanted to share some of our favorite tours.
We are proud to present version 4.0 of the Mapillary iOS app. This is a major release that brings a lot of improvements. Most notably, we have replaced all the old web views with native counterparts.
This is a guest post from one of our very dedicated users filipc who took part of a mapping event in the Netherlands.
We have up until today been using Github, Twitter and email for a lot of community conversation. It has been working okay but not perfect so many of you have suggested to use a forum instead. We think this is a great idea and are today very happy to release the very first version of our new community forum.
Last month, we talked about the accuracy improvement of traffic sign recognition with the help of Mapillary users. Today, we would like to share some more updates on traffic signs.
A couple of days ago we silently integrated what3words to Mapillary. what3words is "a global grid of 57 trillion 3m*3m squares." Every single place in the world can be described by three simple words. For example go to "exhales.singer.back" and you will end up at the Mapillary office.
Mapillary data vector tiles allow for simple, interactive integration of Mapillary data. Here's a great example of integrating vector tile data using MapZen's Tangram map render.
About 6 months after we introduced traffic sign recognition, as of today, we have received ~180,000 (edits/confirms) in EU and ~23,000 (edits/confirms) in US through the traffic sign feedback system. This is an amazing achievement by our users. Thank you for all the great work!
This is a guest post from Mapillary user Jorge López Fueyo @nokutu reporting on the state of the JOSM Mapillary plugin.
This weekend I attended the Geocamp ES in Sevilla and it was great! Geocamp is a so-called unconference. That is a friendly, unstructured event to talk and share ideas with Geo professionals and geeks. That was the 3rd edition in Spain and the 1st in Sevilla organized by the super-motivated Geoinquietos Sevilla
Jan Erik, Johan and myself attended the State of the Map US conference on June 6-8. With more than 800 map enthusiastic attendees, the event became the biggest OpenStreetMap conference in history. It was held in the UN Headquarters in New York City. We experienced interesting talks, inspiring conversations and excellent social events. Special credit goes to the organizers who put together a fantastic conference.
After the first steps of integrating iD and Mapillary, we are happy to announce that we have integrated the Mapillary Street Signs as a layer into our fork of the iD editor. This was done together with the help of the OpenStreetMap community and the fantastic developers at Mapbox like @jfire. We hope to get this accepted into the main code base after more feedback.
As you have probably noticed, we at Mapillary love to experiment with bleeding edge technology. Recently we showed technical implications and benefits of using vector tiles and what it means to you as Mapillary users. However, we did not give you the full picture yet as along with vector tiles we'd like to share improvements to our web app.
Today we're announcing the first version of our Mapillary data vector tiles. Vector tiles are the vector data equivalent of image tiles commonly used for web maps. The Mapillary data vector tiles encode image sequences and sequence properties in a neat format that doesn't need to be served from any database.
This is a guest post from Mapillary user Andrea Borruso (@aborruso) announcing an upcoming cultural heritage event in Pompeii using Mapillary.
We are really happy to share that we now have a major update of the Mapillary Windows Phone app out in the Windows Store. This release corresponds to the updated iOS app and Android app earlier this spring.
We got invited by the fine folks at HITTCO to do a talk in Merida, it is in the Peninsula of Yucatan and it is close to Cancun. So we thought it would be a great opportunity to do our first meetup in Mexico and explore this fine city.
As you may have seen in Jan Erik’s last blog post, Mapillary now has over 10 million photos, 11.6 million as I write this. This is a huge milestone for not only us, but for the whole team of mappers out there who are finding ever more ways to use Mapillary. The purpose of this post is to shed light on the many ways the Mapillary community is mapping and to encourage users to interact with one another to share the knowledge.
Our Barcelona trip could not have started any better, today we where rewarded with great weather to do our first Mapillary Meetup in Catalunya. In just a few days we manage to put together a mapping party around the Horta Labyrinth, one of those enigmatic places that represents Barcelona. A garden museum in the northern part of the city with a great view to the Mediterranean sea.
Over the last few weeks you may have noticed that there has been increasingly more and better emails from Mapillary. We were testing things out and at first there were too many of them and the layout was not great. You can change your notification settings here..
We are extremely glad to finally release a new major version of the Mapillary Android app. This release corresponds to the recent release of the iOS app.
We have gotten a lot of feedback over the last year, and finally we got around to completely rewrite big parts of the application. There are a few things that stand out as important so we want to mention them.
A week and a half ago we released our traffic sign detection and got an awesome response from you guys. We deliberately released it without any feedback system. We didn’t know if this was something that anybody cared about so we didn’t want to spend valuable developer time on something nobody wanted.
Along with opening up the traffic sign detection to everyone, we wanted to share a small tool we have developed while working on that project. Meet Traffico, a font we use for generating the beautiful traffic sign icons you can see in the map view at Mapillary.
Today we are happy to announce another feature requested by our faithful Mapillary users - traffic sign recognition. We have processed over 6 million images and detected all the traffic signs in the United States and Europe. From now on every image added in these regions will go through our system and will be categorized with traffic sign data.
We just closed a $1.5M seed round led by Sequoia. Also participating in the seed round are some great funds, Playfair, Wellington, and LDV Capital, and a number of prominent angel investors. (list updated soon)
Over the last year we have received a lot of feedback on our app. Some of the most asked for features related to how to improve photo collection, better reviewing before uploading on device, better browsing on device, more information on processing progress and what happens around you. After looking the same since we started, it is now time to update the app.
Ever since we started the OpenSfM project, we have been exploring the potentials of the 3D reconstructions built using photos contributed by Mapillary users.
A few weeks ago one of our users, malenki, asked us if it would be feasible to use Mapillary to record an extensive and truly fantastic hike over the course of 10 days in Albania. Turns out it is. He has written a great blog post about the hardware setup.
As we have written in an earlier blog post, we have been working with the OpenStreetMap iD editor developers to integrate Mapillary as a source for editing OpenStreetMap.
There are a number of very capable, cheap Bluetooth GPS devices out there like this Garmin GLO which gets much better accuracy than a normal smartphone. Most of them work out-of-the-box with iOS, but on Android some setup steps are required to get them working.
Six months after our launch it is now time for an update of our policies. While our previous terms regulated what we can do with photos contributed to Mapillary we decided that more clarity and detail would be helpful on things like how you are allowed to use the service, your rights to photos, how we handle your personal data, copyright infringement and more.
We have been working closely with the OpenStreetMap community in order to find the best way to leverage all the fantastic coverage that is starting to emerge on Mapillary to improve OpenStreetMap data.
Do you find yourself sometimes writing small scripts just to introspect some JSON? Say we want to get some image from the Mapillary API, the URL for getting GeoJSON from an image search
is http://api.mapillary.com/v1/im/search?min-lat=55.611&max-lat=55.613&min-lon=12.994&max-lon=12.995&max-results=3&geojson=true:
We are continuing our work on showing all the great data that we have. Recently we added connections and notifications to connect mappers.
At Mapillary we do a lot of things with the photos you upload. One thing we do is to automatically blur license plates and peoples faces for privacy purposes. No license plate detector or face detector is perfect and sometimes we will incorrectly blur areas, sometimes we will miss important areas that needed blurring.
The task
A few days ago, we tested what it would take to capture tracks using professional equipment like the awesome drones by Intuitive Aerial in Linköping, Sweden.
This past weekend we captured some data for the upcoming Traffic Jam Session hackathon here in Malmö. Since the event is about hacking public transportation data, we mapped some of the local bus lines. We used six Android phones running the Mapillary app that captured a total of 50GB of photos.
After we sent out the car mounts after our survey, we received a lot of positive feedback. However, there are not many mounts for bikes that are suitable for Mapillary.
It has been six weeks since we announced that we were licensing our photos with Creative Commons. The license we chose was the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (CC BY-NC). Our reasoning was explained in the accompanying blog post.
When you are a startup, you don't have much time. In our case, we want to track some of our KPIs, as the numbers of users, images and power users over time (lots of other historic KPIs like user retention too, but that's another blog). We also want have a nice dashboard but not build a system for that.
We got a complaint from a user who flagged an image by accident, see this issue.
As we are now entering a phase of Complaint Driven Development, this morning I found a
great little fix to this.
Angular.js which we use for the web client, does not come with a built-in confirmation dialogue. However, here is
a great little generic confirm-button directive that avoids the onClick method and can be reused.
As Mapillary is starting to grow in popularity, we got a number of requests to be able to embed the Mapillary view into other web pages. So, we built it! This is how it goes - for details, see the developer page:
Yesterday we updated the site with some major changes. Some of you may have noticed that loading the photos after clicking the map took a long time for certain locations with lots of photos.
With this post we are starting our company blog to share long-form content on topics that we are passionate about and topics that relate to Mapillary. For announcements and short-style content, follow us on twitter.