It feels like yesterday when we announced that the 500 millionth image was uploaded to Mapillary. Now just eight months later we are thrilled to announce that number has doubled and there are now one billion high-resolution images on the platform, all available for improving maps around the world.

The core principle behind Mapillary has always been that collaboration is the key to keeping maps up to date. It is not possible for any single actor to collect all of the data necessary to keep maps up to date at an ever-increasing frequency—the one billion images on Mapillary are the product of people, cities, and companies all working together to improve the maps they depend on.

We saw an astonishing contribution of over 576 million images from all around the world in 2019. The Mapillary community used street-level images for everything from the fight against illegal waste disposal in Kampala, Uganda, to optimizing leaf clean-up of streets in Washington D.C. and adding address numbers to OpenStreetMap.

Explore 360° imagery uploaded by the City of Detroit to the Mapillary platform

Our longstanding partnership with HERE and the Map Creator Community brought in nearly four million images this year. We also saw an influx of millions of images from lvl5, Detroit’s mission to provide better services to its citizens by becoming the best-mapped city in the US, Grab capturing imagery to improve OpenStreetMap data in Thailand.

With the launch of the Mapillary Marketplace this year, we made it easier than ever for mapmakers, cities, and organizations to access the map data they need. This demand-driven marketplace brings together people in need of map data with people willing to capture images and verify the data generated from these images. Currently, the Marketplace is actively capturing images in thirty locations around the world and over 6.1 million images have been contributed by Marketplace drivers so far.

In a game-changer for logistics, delivery, and ride-sharing companies in 2019 we launched the Mapillary Dashcam—making it effortless for any fleet of vehicles to become a mapping fleet and collect their own map data. In the US alone, two billion packages will be delivered this holiday season, and in six fewer days than normal. This leaves little room for error as each break in the map means time and money lost, and the risk of delivery delays means fewer presents under the tree. Moving forward, fleets can collect their own data and take more ownership of the maps they depend on and part of the growth in imagery over the last few months is from fleets actively capturing in cities all over the world.

2019 has, without a doubt, been an exciting year for us. Here are some other highlights from what we have been up to over the past 12 months.

• 42 new object classes extracted and automatically positioned on the global map as Map Features
• The Mapillary Traffic Sign Dataset—the world’s most diverse publicly available dataset for teaching machines to see and understand traffic signs
• Our collaboration with Zenuity, AstaZero, RISE, and AI Innovation of Sweden to build the first open dataset for maintaining and updating HD maps
• Six computer vision benchmarking challenges won—two at CVPR and four at ICCV

In 2020, we will continue to make improvements to the platform that make uploading images and downloading data faster and easier. For example, scaling up the Marketplace, rolling out a new solution for logistics and mobility fleets, and of course some new groundbreaking computer vision features.

Stay tuned and join us in the journey to the next billion images!

/Jan Erik, CEO and co-founder