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Camera Vans To Photograph 50 Million Buildings
dritan writes "A new van unveiled at CeBIT America is equipped with 50 digital cameras and takes pictures every 15 feet -- with the goal of photographing 50 million buildings in the country. These photos could be cross-referenced with aerial photographs so that law enforcement or insurance agencies can get overhead and street level views of the same location -- just by entering an address." Time to hang out the "Hi, Mom!" signs.
is it legal?
It'd be interesting to see how such a survey affects sites like MapQuest... as it'd be real useful to have the building you're drving to circled on a street-level picture when you're traveling in an unknown-to-you metro area.
My place isn't likely to be visible to these guys - I'm in a condo, and I'm on the side of the building that doesn't face the street, just the next buildings. MapQuest used to have aerial photos, so I've seen pictures of my roof, and probably a picture of my car's roof, but I don't know if any of the free mapping problems still offer that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"Still, this would be a great way to find out who has lawn gnomes, plastic flamingos, and those fat-lady-bending-over things in their gardens.
Funny, but you make a very good point. Should this database leak into the "wrong hands" that has access to a competent programmer, targeted robberies could increase. Cross correlations are you friend. Get enough RAM and find the neighborhoods with new sports cars and a little more research and in one night a crew can have at it. Who knew theft could be so efficient?
Burn Hollywood Burn
Art precedes technology: The Camera Van
A year or so ago, Cook County officials sent a van around photographing every house and residential street in the county. They planned to offer the pictures on the internet, but I'm not sure how successful they were.
And yes, it made the news and raised a lot of controversy, but in the end, Cook County told its critics they could shove it, and went ahead and did it anyway.
I guess its just another case of "Can't fight City Hall"....
Now, if a private citizen had attempted to do the same, you can bet they would have been arrested. And if someone tried to do it now, they'd get thrown in jail as a suspected terrorist.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
They may need more vans.
In Allegheny County, PA, you can go to the county assessment website (http://www2.county.allegheny.pa.us/RealEstate/Sea rch.asp)
and search on street name, address, OWNER, etc. In the information for most houses are also the pictures of said house. So this is nothing really new, at least around here.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
With US journalism (see yesterday's New York Times mea culpa) slowly coming round to admitting that it was duped in the rush to war, we're at a point where that institution's filters can't really be trusted to portray reality. Why not simply put a few of these on the road and let them transmit images back from Iraq?
The American people might be surprised to see the images readily available to the rest of the world of this "liberation."
Not neccessarily. There can be other factors inflating the price of land in a neighborhood. For example, when Detroit was proposing to build three casinos, the price of property in the proposed casino district tripled -- but it wasn't exactly areas worth robbing.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I think many municipalities (including my own) already have a freely available, online database of home and landowners, complete with curbside photos. Other information is available in hard form, you need only to go to the town records repository and ask. This isn't really new.
In my experience, thieves are generally pretty poor at what they do, though I'm sure there are a few adept ones. They do their "site surveys" on foot and take the most useless and worthless stuff. E.g. burglars stole my shitty stereo (w/o the faceplate), my cds and $20 binoculars, but they left a (very portable) $400 unicycle in the back seat. The parts could easily have been stripped and sold to BMXers for way more than the other stuff.
Link it to map quest. Driving directions could be visual.
Turn left here: [picture of the intersection]
Render them together, and you could have a 3d rendering of the trip (made up of 2d images used as a textures). On star could send them to your heads-up-display (you have one, right?)
I can walk out my door right now, with my camera, and snap pictures of every house on my street.
u it.html). That might also get you arrested (I, personally, have been arrested for taking pictures of an industrial plant from a public sidewalk).
What'll that get me? Not much, except a bunch of pictures of houses on my street.
Umm... That is highly likely to get you at least a conversation with cops.
That might also get you sued (see e.g. http://www.californiacoastline.org/streisand/laws
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
It would not be hard to generate VR walkthroughs using the photographs described in the article. There has been sw for a long time that can interpolate a VR walkthrough from a flat photograph (an object panorama is when you move around a VR object, ala a model of a car, rather than having the panorama move around you, ala being in a room; a walkthrough combines both).
For instance there was an astonishing product called Canoma, which existed only for Macintosh and was bought by Adobe; Canoma could generate incredible object models given nothing but an outline of a building's profile.
There are others now that are even better but I don't know the names, they're primarily used for biomedical modeling. Some can generate object models from slices (it can be important in research to generate a 3D model of, say, features of a mouse brain from slices of the brain. In this case you're interpolating a 3D model from various 1D slices of an object). Some generate wire basket models from flat photographs.
Anyway, it would not be difficult to generate neighborhood walkthroughs/flyovers using photographs from street and aerial. More interesting, it probably woulnd't be hard to generate them dynamically as requested page views. If somebody takes all the photographs first.
Several French cities, including Paris, are available at www.pagesjaunes.fr (France Telecom's yellow pages). I used it to see the building in Bordeaux where my brother had found an appartment, and to check out the hospital where I was born according to my birth certificate, etc... fun.
b ruit/default.ASP also gives you a 3d map of the amount of street noise received by each building. Useful before you buy an apartment.
On the City of Paris' website http://www.paris.fr/FR/Environnement/bruit/carto_
Well, for starters, what happens when your house isn't blue anymore with tan trim...and the fire truck drives past your house? Given how much of a pain in the ass it is to do the photos, do they honestly intend to update the DB constantly?
Out in western MA, they had a very easy solution to all this. The town gave out bright plastic signs with a picture of a fire truck and the street number of the house...and a little metal stake to hang it from. Instructions on where to place it relative to -your- driveway were given. This was done because many people don't have mailboxes(they have PO boxes in town), or they were confusingly located(ie across the street, at the end of a private driveway, etc).
Works perfectly. This is just some urban idiot who doesn't understand that the problem's already been solved- just not everyone has chosen to implement it.
Please help metamoderate.
I do the same thing, except the first time a cop rolls by I try to flag him down and explain what I'm doing. Most of them are fairly understanding; I've even had one get out and wave off (minimal) traffic so I could get a good angle on a photo. You'd be surprised how well talking to cops works, especially bored night beat cops. And if you've got one cop car hanging out, other cops will generally leave you alone, presuming brother cop knows what's going on.
I see no concern with the databasing; so anyone can cross-index a house adress with its frontal appearance - nothing they couldn't do by driving up in front of it.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
This is a stupid comment. Robbers already KNOW where the rich neighbourhoods are. How do I know this? Because I know where the rich neighbourhoods are. I look for sparse residential areas with big houses and few trees. Chances are somebody rich lives there.
And if you need a lot of RAM to figure out which house on my block has the Porsche parked in front of it, methinks you need to spend some time away from the computer.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I read a claim that when it comes to navigation, men's minds are more spacially oriented while women's minds are more landmark oriented. Thus, maps work better for men than for women.
Women can make due with written directions, but what if there was a way to give directions by providing a photograph of every intersection from the 1st person, with the turns marked by arrows? Instead of memorizing street names or distances, you could just say "I'll turn when I see this, I'll turn when I see that..." You could be completely illiterate and still navigate. To make such a system possible, you'd have to photograph every intersection from every approach, at day and night, every season (which is frequent enough to account for new construction in most areas). It would be very labor intensive, but it would provide a very valuable service. Assuming illiterate, map-incompetent people have enough money to pay for it.
there are 2.27+ million miles of paved roads in the US, not to mention all the unpaved ones...
First off, even at 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day, it'd take about 8 1/2 years to take the photos.
Second, taking 50 pictures every fifteen feet comes to ~17 thousand pictures per mile. Even at a measly 1 megapixel each, that's 17gigs per mile. Multiply that by a couple million miles and I think you may have just a little storage and database problem....
...building codes would often prevent building a subterrainian home...
Really? I don't know of any codes that prevent a basement in a house (unless it's a flood area). So, what you do is build a regular house, make the basement your primary living quarters, and have the upstairs completely empty (i.e., no appliances, limited fixtures, just enough to get an occupancy permit), then use the main floor for the purposes you'd normally use your basement for (i.e., storage, junk, etc).
Here is another great use of this kind of database. We used the pagesjaunes.fr site when we were going to Paris. We were using Go-Today travel, which listed a dozen or so hotels in an increasing price scale. They had links to details about the hotels, but, not knowing the city, you couldn't tell much about where they were.
:-)
So, we looked up the hotels by address and "strolled" down the streets on either side. Two were in a really undesirable looking neighborhoods. The one we picked was on a nice side street with cafes and stores on either side. Very useful.
One of the hotels must have been recently renovated. The pictures online were dated and were only a year or so old at the time, but the address of the hotel was an abandoned building
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Unneccessary. I could send you photos (har har har) of houses that people were going to build.. and then they ran out of money after just putting in a full basement (required in my area.. Maine.. brr that's cold). They just slap a half tall roof on the property, put in a nice entry way, and call it a day.
There is no reason that it couldn't be hidden with some shrubbery, or even sunked a few feet deeper and a submarine style entrance attached.
How do they maintain this image collection so that it stays up to date?
Well I imagine the only ways would be by:
1)comparing changes in satellite photos, e.g. new building appears in grid reference X,Y
2)analyzing new planning applications
3)taking some sort of "draft" distance photographs which are automatically compared to previous "draft" photos before zooming in on the changes
However technology aside I still can't see how such a database could be maintained easily. Existing aerial photographs seem to quickly go out of data as it is. Still I wonder if you will be able to pay/make requests for the van to turn up somewhere to photograph? e.g. your own house.
In fact, the basis of law in not equality (as people like myself posit it should be), but in fact the basis of law is priviledge. And if you look at the roots of the word, privi-ledge, you get private-law. That is to say, those laws which are to be enforced must always be enforced unequally. If every law were enforced on every person, then we would find ourselves caught in the "That which is not prohibited is mandated, that which is not mandated is prohibited" situation (which presumably precludes either free-choice or free-dom).
So it's legal, yeah, as long as you're not in the wrong place at the wrong time, or have long hair, or holding a placard, or have the "wrong" skin color, or just plain weird out the cops.
Is it legal? Yeah, totally legal. Just don't get caught.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer