Alternatives to Google Street View

[misaugstad]

Brief description of problem/feature

Over the years, we've talked about switching to (or more likely adding additional support for) imagery datasets other than Google Street View (GSV). We have one such ticket specifically for Mapillary (#3599). I figured that we should start compiling some of those option in a thread on Github instead of them showing up in Slack as transient! Some recent ones that we've talked about:

• Infra3D, and @jsomeara is working on integrating their API into PS!
• Mapillary (#3599)
• KartaView
• Mosaic (demo dataset available from this link at time of writing)
• footpath.ai (imagery from the sidewalk instead of the street)

Some of the benefits of other data sources could be:

• A more permissive license, allowing us to upload data to OSM or share the data more broadly in other ways
• The inclusion of depth data for more accurate geo-location and additional features (like determining sidewalk width)
• Inclusion of user-contributed photos more easily
• Similarly, some datasets may have better coverage or newer coverage in some areas

[jonfroehlich]

Thanks for adding this. I spoke with Maeed from footpath.ai (founder) at our UrbanAccess'24 workshop and he said he would give us access (they'd have to create an academic license for us).