Street level imagery from VicRoads and Geelong - on Mapillary!
One of the most intriguing, but intractable datasets I came across at VicRoads was several year’s worth of Hawkeye data. Every two years, VicRoads contracts ARRB to travel the full length of the 22,500 kilometre VicRoads-managed network, recording fine grained detail like surface quality, line marking reflectivity, slope and so on. To assist staff in making sense of the data, photographs are taken approximately every 20: forwards, left, right, backwards, and even down.
In all, it’s several terabytes. I struggled for ages to process it: extracting individual frames from the provided AVIs, attempting to cross-reference a GPS location from the accompanying log files, and then spending far too long learning the intricacies of OpenStack’s Swift storage in order to upload it all to VicNode - a large storage facility for data useful to researchers.
And then I came across Mapillary. It’s a crowd-sourced alternative to Google Streetview, with map images available under a Creative Commons licence. StreetView data is notoriously restrictive in its licensing, while Mapillary is actively working to get their content into Wikipedia and to help improve OpenStreetMap.
Coverage in Victoria was pretty poor - a handful of low volume contributors. Would they be interested in the data?
Yes!
In two days, Yubin and Jan at Mapillary did what I couldn’t: extract the images, align it with the log files and gain access to tens of thousands of geo-located street-level images.
Getting final approval for release from VicRoads took longer. They were (understandably) nervous about possible privacy concerns, and were greatly relieved that Mapillary has face and number plate blurring built in.
The full import into Mapillary’s servers took weeks, but the end result is amazing:
And then Will McIntosh from City of Greater Geelong casually mentioned that they have the same kind of data! Whoosh, another 3.5 million images!
Just awesome to see local roads around Geelong and the Bellarine Peninsula linking perfectly with the VicRoads arterial road network...and even a few sections of Bellarine Rail Trail I contributed with a bike-mounted camera, plus some walking trails around Barwon Heads.
The end result: a beautiful example of valuable government data made accessible and more useful through the right technology partnership at the right time. If any other government bodies have similar data, Mapillary would love to make it available in the same way.
Read Mapillary’s take: “Mapillary and Public Road Data”












