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An Introduction to Mapillary 🚀

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What is Mapillary?

Mapillary is a crowdsourced street level imagery platform powered by computer vision. Anyone can upload imagery to Mapillary, using just about any camera or smart phone, and we'll host it (and extract map features) for free! To date, well over 2.4 billion images have been uploaded to Mapillary. 

 

Mapillary allows you to...

  • Capture & upload your own street-level imagery with any camera, anywhere, and put places on the map through a collaborative street-level view of the world.
  • Explore your world via our web app and mobile apps. Move through images with smooth transitions powered by our state-of-the-art Structure from Motion technology. Share imagery on your website or socials.
  • Extract spatial data about the places you care about. Implement it into your database, workflow, or application using our GIS tool integrations, the Mapillary Python SDK, the Mapillary API,  the MapillaryJS JavaScript library, or grab a geojson directly from our web app.
  • Update maps with a new point of view with details that are not visible from aerial images. Mapillary imagery integrates seamlessly with OpenStreetMap, making editing the world's best map easy. 
  • Make asset management cost effective using Mapillary map features. When organizations upload their own imagery and host it on Mapillary, they're able to capture exactly where they want with the frequency that serves their needs. Our computer vision technology auto-extracts the most common asset management objects (40+ feature classes) and traffic signs (1,500+ sign classes), minimizing your digitizing time! 
  • Open-source your imagery to help everyone make better decisions about cities and roads, mobility and navigation, and autonomous driving. Several research datasets have been created using Mapillary imagery, including our own Mapillary Research Datasets. None of them would have been possible without our user community contributing from all over the world!

Cool! But how does it work?

 

Mapillary works on the principle that anyone can capture and use street-level images. By sharing data on a collaborative platform, everyone wins. Regardless of your use case (hobbyist, commercial, research), Mapillary is 100% free to use! 

All you need to start contributing is your smartphone and our mobile app. Alternatively, if you've got a GoPro, dashcam, or other action camera (and an associated GPS track) we make it easy to upload your imagery in bulk via the Mapillary Desktop Uploader or Mapillary Tools for the command line. 

After uploading, your images will go through processing to blur faces and license plates. Then, our computer vision technology creates 3D reconstructions and recognizes objects in the images. 

The images on Mapillary are available for anyone to explore, download, and use. The images and the data extracted from them can be used by map makers, cities, transport agencies, logistics and delivery companies, automotive companies, humanitarian organizations, NGOs, and anyone else who needs geospatial information from street-level images.

 

Mapillary Case Studies

No Mapillary use-case is ever 100% the same. Check out a few of our favorite stories below.

 

The City of Detroit: the most covered city on Mapillary

The City of Detroit adopted Mapillary at scale in 2018 to help address an asset management crisis. Six years later, 99.8% of all public roads have been mapped, making Detroit the undisputed champion of city-level contributions on Mapillary. Read up on how they scaled their street level imagery program and why Mapillary has played a crucial part in it.

 

Be Group: the Vietnamese rideshare company using Mapillary to reduce travel time

Be Group is a fast-growing ridesharing company in Vietnam. Since joining Mapillary, they have contributed almost 9 million images and 27,000 km.

Be Group uses Mapillary to identify street signs that restrict vehicle address (pulling these from the Mapillary API), determine and catalog the width of roads, and update their database of pick-up and drop-off points. 

 

A One-Man Mission to Map Brussels, Belgium

Stéphane De Greef, an environmental engineer and open mapping enthusiast, mapped all the streets of Brussels, Belgium using only his bicycle, cell phone, and a 360° GoPro camera over the course of a year and a half. He uploaded all of the over 600,000 images to Mapillary, enabling the OpenStreetMap Belgium community to make many new edits!

 

Read more case studies on the Mapillary Case Studies page and the Mapillary Blog!

 

Need more information?

Be sure to check out our other content on specific components of the Mapillary ecosystem. Some of the best places to start would be the following:

Have a specific question? Contact us!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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