Mapillary works hard to make cities smarter. We’ve spent a lot of time perfecting our uploading capabilities, automatic GIS integration and our traffic sign detection – and it’s paid off. 4YFN (4 Years From Now), a business platform focused on connecting global startups, selected us as the best business in the Smart City Industry.
Here I am accepting their award at the Smart City Expo in Barcelona. We hope that in “4 Years From Now” all smart cities will have have street-level photo maps full of important data.
This is a great honor for Mapillary and our applications for cities. On the same day that we received the award, the Swedish city of Helsingborg released one million photos on Mapillary as part of their open geo-data initiative, which will help spread local street view images to everyone – including those who want to use 3D mapping to develop community services. It’s very exciting to see cities embracing the possibilities for citizen engagement with Mapillary, and we look forward to helping more cities make the best use of their data.
I’m a computer vision guy, so I have loved working on the traffic sign recognition and 3D reconstruction that makes our platform powerful for cities. It’s an honor to all of us at Mapillary to have these capabilities recognized by 4YFN, and an even greater one to see them helping communities.
There is more to come from us for cities. We’re a community project, and cities are communities – it just makes sense. Mapillary is where consumer technology meets infrastructure; a powerful combination of interests. We help cities do wide surveys of their pavement, signage and parks: the places that make cities work.
We’re looking at the kind of civic engagement that takes us back to the level of the greek polis, and forward to the technology of science fiction. If a community uses a park, they can certainly be in charge of its documentation. Mapillary will make that documentation accessible and actionable by creating a navigable 3D street level map and using machine vision to match important pieces to the city’s GIS.
Traffic signs and pavement conditions are just the first two ways to use the data in a street level map. We’ve been developing those because they are so obviously important to cities. If the speed limit changes, a city can make sure that they’ve changed all of the signs with our automatic recognition software. If a pothole gets filled, a picture from May will show the hole but the one from June will show perfect pavement.
Getting our achievements recognized makes us even more excited for our next innovations. Much sooner than 4 Years From Now our computer vision will be able to pick out a whole new class of map data from pictures, and our 3D reconstruction will be better than ever. Smart cities will be using their GIS data in innovative ways, and Mapillary will be supporting them.