[Talk-ca] Mapillary coverage in Vancouver

[Paul Norman]

For some time I have been taking pictures to map from, and now that 
Mapillary is out, I finally have a way to share them.

Mapillary is a company that is making a service similar to the old 
OpenStreetView, where they collect pictures of roads. The difference is 
that they currently offer the pictures under an open license, CC BY-SA, 
and they have given explicit permission to derive information for 
OpenStreetMap.

They have a clever app, but what matters for me is that I can upload the 
pictures from my car-mounted camera after geotagging them. As I drive a 
reasonable distance and I've designed my setup for capturing images for 
mapping from, this means that the Mapillary coverage is building up in 
Greater Vancouver with excellent images for OSM use.

The only problem is I have been unable to keep up with the rate I've 
been taking pictures. This means there's a lot of information in 
Mapillary pictures that can be entered into OSM.

You can see the coverage at 
http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/12/49.2076/-122.8266. Note: The long 
straight lines are a bug in the Mapillary display.

Because I have the raw images and GPX files, I haven't bothered to 
figure out a good workflow for using the Mapillary images in JOSM, and 
end up having a browser window open on one screen and JOSM on the other 
if I do need to use images from someone else.

So, when mapping in Vancouver, consider Mapillary as a source.

Technical:
Images are captured at a settable interval, generally 2 seconds from a 
dash-mounted camera. Post-processing is then done for sharpness and 
contrast, time corrections applied, and the results correlated with GPX 
files from my GPS unit.