Computer Vision News - June 2016

The application of the month of June comes from Malmö, in Sweden: Mapillary is a great solution for crowdsourced street imaging that can accept photos from essentially any source. It is a collaborative platform to which anybody can contribute by adding outdoor pictures to its database and the homonymous company which created it has just closed an $8M Series A financing round. About 80% of its content comes from images taken with smartphones equipped with Mapillary’s app (either in iOS or Android); images are geotagged, uploaded and then combined with everyone else’s pics. The remaining 20% of images is taken with action cameras such as GoPro and Garmin, which can be put on a bike or a car and can also be controlled by Mapillary’s app. When a new photo comes in, it is immediately combined with other photos taken nearby, so to stitch them together in a representation which is quite similar to that of Street View . Doing this across users and across times provides a dynamic view of any place that people took photos of. Once all these views are available, data is extracted from them using computer vision and that data is made available. We have asked the CEO of Mapillary Jan Erik Solem to tell us more about the app and its typical users. Solem told us that some people use Mapillary simply as a way of documenting their travels and their vacations, by sending a link to a friend who in turn will receive a map and a street view of what the visited place looked like; some people use the app to document their own home environment, their neighborhood, the city they live in and their favorite places; other people use it to edit maps. Thus Solem describes the company’s business model : the application is free for everyone to use and they only charge for the data which they extract from the image database. Mapillary’s commercial opportunity stays in the fact that Street View is used in a lot of different applications, often costing (in his words) an insane amount of money. “ This means enormous costs savings and a system that is immediate and many times faster than available alternatives ” 4 Computer Vision News Application Mapillary Jan Erik Solem, CEO - Mapillary