Mapillary is a service for sharing

crowdsourced Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...

geotagged photos, developed by remote company Mapillary AB, based in

Malmö Malmö (, ; da, Malmø ) is the largest city in the Swedish county (län) of Scania (Skåne). It is the third-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm and Gothenburg, and the sixth-largest city in the Nordic region, with a municipal popul ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic countries, Nordic c ...

. Mapillary was launched in 2013 and acquired by Facebook, Inc. (now

Meta Platforms Meta Platforms, Inc., (file no. 3835815) doing business as Meta and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns Facebook, Insta ...

) in 2020. This is one of the few alternative platforms that has street level imagery like

Google Street View Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expan ...

History

Mapillary co-founders were Jan Erik Solem, Johan Gyllenspetz, Peter Neubauer and Yubin Kuang. According to Solem, Mapillary was founded to allow

crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...

of street-level imagery for use with

computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the human ...

. The project started in September 2013, with an iPhone app released in November 2013, followed by an Android app released in January 2014. Mapillary received $1.5 million in seed capital funding from a group of investors, led by

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total ...

in January 2015. In March 2016, it raised $8M additional funding (Atomico, Sequoia, LDV Capital, and PlayFair) for expanded operations, including more computer vision talent and a San Francisco office. In spring 2018, the company received $15M investment led by BMW i Ventures for a total estimated funding of $25M. In September 2018, Mapillary announced a "collaboration" with Amazon to use the Rekognition visual data analysis platform to extract text from Mapillary's huge database of 350 million images. As large cities struggle to manage current street sign inventories, the first major project is identifying parking signs and extracting sign text for one large U.S. city, which will use the data to build a parking app to help save drivers time when searching for parking. In October 2018, the company made CNBC's annual list of top 100 start-ups to watch. In November 2018, Mapillary released a software development kit (SDK) allowing interested third-party software developers to integrate Mapillary image-capture functionality in their apps, opening the way for additional input channels. In June 2020,

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...

acquired Mapillary for an undisclosed amount. After the acquisition, commercial use of Mapillary was made available free of charge. Due to Mapillary being widely used for contributing to

OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed g ...

and fears that Facebook might shut the service down, a tool was subsequently created for synchronizing data between Mapillary and KartaView (formerly OpenStreetCam). By November 14, over 55 TiB or 30 million images had been transferred to KartaView. In August 2020, Mapillary announced that more cameras will be available for contributors, making possible streetside coverage of more places that Mapillary might not visit.

Features

Mapillary offers different capturing modes including walking, riding (either a bike or car), or panorama. On 10 September 2014, Mapillary announced that they now support

panorama A panorama (formed from Greek πᾶν "all" + ὅραμα "view") is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film, seismic images, or 3D modeling. The word was originally coined i ...

s and spherical photos. As of May 2014, Mapillary had around 0.5 million photos and by December 2014, it had over 5.5 million. As of March 2015 it had 10 million photos, and by June 11, 2015, Mapillary had over 20 million photos, and by August 9 over 30 million. As of February 6, 2016 Mapillary had over 50 million photos. Mapillary images, millions

Major dataset contributions

In 2018, Mapillary acquired major image datasets from two USA state transportation departments: approximately 5 million images each contributed by the Vermont Department of Transportation and the

Arizona Department of Transportation The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT, pronounced "A-Dot") is an Arizona state government agency charged with facilitating mobility within the state. In addition to managing the state's highway system, the agency is also involved with p ...

License

The images on Mapillary can be used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (

CC BY-SA A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...

). There is special permission to derive data from the photos for contributing to

and

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all of the Wikimedia projects in ...

. The GPX tracks can be used without restriction, and derived data can be used provided it is ODbL. The license was changed on 29 April 2014 from

CC BY-NC A Creative Commons NonCommercial license (CC NC, CC BY-NC or NC license) is a Creative Commons license which a copyright holder can apply to their media to give public permission for anyone to reuse that media only for noncommercial activities. C ...

. Mobile apps (Android and iPhone) are

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and i ...

Research/datasets

In May 2017, Mapillary released an open source subset of its very large and ever-expanding crowdsourced image dataset, the Mapillary Vistas Dataset of 25,000 street-level images, with pixel-wise annotation, to help train autonomous vehicle AI system algorithms. With data from 190 countries, they described it as "the world's largest, most diverse dataset for object recognition on street-level imagery" and offered it free for both academic and commercial researchers, but licensing is required for commercial product integration.

Mapillary Tasker

On November 28, 2017, Mapillary released a beta tool known as the Mapillary Tasker. Mapillary Tasker "enables a task creator to tell other contributors where help is needed and what needs to be done." On the other hand, contributors can sort through the various tasks listed on the beta and work on whatever projects are interesting and feasible. The tasks can range from "completing coverage, making map edits based on images, and verifying object detection," and separated between capture, map edit, and verification tasks on the actual tool. As a side note, because the tool is currently in beta, users have to send requests to be reviewed by Mapillary administrators, rather than having the autonomy to post whatever task you want assistance with.

References

External links

* {{Facebook navbox Android (operating system) software IOS software Windows Phone software Internet properties established in 2013 Mobile route-planning software Web mapping 2013 establishments in Sweden Street view services Remote companies Meta Platforms acquisitions 2020 mergers and acquisitions Crowdsourcing Creative Commons-licensed websites