Friday, September 01, 2017

800,000 Street Views of Amsterdam


The City of Amsterdam has added 800,000 panoramic images of Amsterdam to Mapillary, the crowd-sourced alternative to Street View. This new 360 degree imagery includes lots of Street View imagery of the city's canals captured by canal boat.

The best way to view the new imagery is by zooming in on Amsterdam on Mapillary. You can then select 'filters' and turn on the "Only show 360 panoramas" option. The green dots on the map show the locations of all the street panoramas and the blue dots show where the canal panoramas are located.

Mapillary has been analyzing the new Amsterdam imagery to help improve its base map of the city. Mapillary's neural networks are able to scan the imagery and pick out 80 different types of objects. These include large structures, such as bridges and buildings, and street furniture, such as benches and trash bins. This data can then be used to improve the map of Amsterdam on OpenStreetMap.

You can explore this data yourself in Amsterdam in 360: From Imagery to Map Data in Seven Days. This article includes a link to an interactive map which allows you to filter the panoramic imagery by object. For example you can select the 'bikes' object and view all the panoramic images in Amsterdam with bikes in them (it's most of them!).

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