Field Imagery
The Mission
Commercial street-level imagery is often locked behind restrictive licenses, proprietary viewers, and paywalls, making it inaccessible to our target audience. We are building a sovereign, open-source alternative for Canada.
We will be using Panoramax as a base, but will be expanding upon the project to provide a decentralized platform where field imagery is treated as a public utility: fully downloadable, API-accessible, privacy-compliant, and resilient to shifting priorities.
The Infrastructure
- Storage: High-performance object storage backend for hosting terabytes of 360°, flat field imagery, and oblique imagery.
The Processing Pipeline
We treat field imagery as a data engineering challenge, ensuring “time-to-insight” is minimized for downstream users.
- Ingestion: Raw imagery is captured using diverse hardware (ex. 360° cameras, mobile rigs, meta glasses, drones, etc.) and ingested by our systems.
- Privacy & Anonymization: Before publication, all imagery undergoes a rigorous privacy scrub. We utilize automated detection pipelines to blur faces and license plates, ensuring compliance with Canadian privacy standards while maintaining data utility.
- Standardization: Images are processed into systems-ready formats, making it ready for analysis.
- Metadata Extraction: We extract and normalize/strip identifiying information (ex. EXIF and GPS telemetry), indexing it into a FAIR Catalogue.
Data Products
Unlike commercial platforms that only offer a “view” of the data, we provide the data itself.
- Bulk Datasets: Curated dumps of street-level imagery available for computer vision training, asset management, and change detection models.
- FAIR Data Catalogue Integration: Seamless integration with geospatial workflows (ex. DuckDB, QGIS, Python, R, Julia, etc.).
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