Google's Street View Cars Are Now Giant, Mobile 3D Scanners (arstechnica.com) 42
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's got a hot new ride. The company has a new Street View car with updated cameras, and -- surprisingly -- a set of Lidar (Light, Detection and Ranging) cans! Google doesn't have anything up officially about this, but Wired has the scoop on the new vehicles. The camera system upgrade -- the first in eight years -- greatly improves the image quality while simplifying the rig. In the main ball, Google is down from 15 cameras to seven, making the whole package a lot smaller. These 20MP cameras are aimed all around the car, and the pictures they take are stitched together into a spherical image for Google Maps. There's more to the cars than just the ball though: there are also a pair of "HD" cameras that face directly left and right. These are dedicated to reading street signs, business names, and even posted store hours; those images are funneled to Google's cloud computers for visual processing. The end result of the new cameras will be prettier Street View shots, with higher resolution, better colors, and fewer stitching errors. The better images should also result in more data for Google's various visual feature-detection algorithms.
Wired's report focuses almost entirely on the new cameras, but I think the the most interesting additions are the two LIDAR pucks that hang just below the camera ball. These are the ubiquitous Velodyne VLP-16 "Puck" sensors, allowing the to car "see" in 3D in 360 degrees. These $8,000 Lidar sensors are most commonly used in autonomous car prototypes, so to see them on a Street View car is unexpected. Don't expect the Street View cars to start driving themselves anytime soon -- as Google Street View's Technical Program Manager Steve Silverman says in Wired's video, the Lidar sensors "are used to position us in the world."
Wired's report focuses almost entirely on the new cameras, but I think the the most interesting additions are the two LIDAR pucks that hang just below the camera ball. These are the ubiquitous Velodyne VLP-16 "Puck" sensors, allowing the to car "see" in 3D in 360 degrees. These $8,000 Lidar sensors are most commonly used in autonomous car prototypes, so to see them on a Street View car is unexpected. Don't expect the Street View cars to start driving themselves anytime soon -- as Google Street View's Technical Program Manager Steve Silverman says in Wired's video, the Lidar sensors "are used to position us in the world."
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I keep hearing this, but that would be the biggest loss of life from a conventional artillery barrage in the history of warfare by at least 3 orders of magnitude. Add in that there are twice yearly air raid drills in Seoul and I really don't buy the "millions" dying in 15 minutes.
Sure North Korea has lots of artillery pieces but apparently only around 700 that could strike Seoul. Secondly in the 2010 incident out of some 288 rounds that they should have been able to fire they only managed 170, and only 80 l
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Lots of HUGE assumptions about DPRK's capabilities. Even if they had no artillery pieces, they certainly could deliver an atomic payload to Seoul- doesn't have to be on a missile.
So the US is suddenly willing takes a chance on millions of people's lives in Korea, plus hundreds of thousands more as DPRK could theoretically nuke the US, for what gain? To stop him building ICBMs? Too late. To stop him going thermonuclear? Too late. So why? Because he's rude to the government? 'Regime change', a sudden co
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They are also logging your MAC address. Which gives them GPS coordinates and the vendor for your device. If I had this information I'd be watching you fap to tentacle porn right now on your webcam.
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Depends on the nation and how they interact with photographers on city or public land.
Copyright on some fancy art work in a park thats open to the public but the art work is legally protected from attempts at photography for profit and publication?
Private ownership of some part of a city still open to the public with new photography laws?
A private sector security guard walking out onto public land and wanting to know if someone
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Waymo (Score:4, Interesting)
...two LIDAR pucks ...allowing the to car "see" in 3D in 360 degrees. ... used in autonomous car prototypes, ... "are used to position us in the world."
Think TFA answered it right there. Knowing the precise position of the streetview car helps develop better maps for the Waymo autonomous cars.
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Which would be all well and good until things move around. Like with road construction. Utility work. New construction. Demolition. A nice shiny new traffic light pole.
If the car depended only on the map data, you would have a point. But the car also watches what's happening in front of it, so you don't.
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Yep. Finding a 90% correlation means the car gets very good at localizing its exact location. Plus, who's to say the Waymo cars won't someday be able to update the map?
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More information is better than less information, but only if it's used properly. My strong suspicion is that while they're getting all this data, they don't have a good way of using it on live, on-the-road, autonomous vehicles without human curation. So I don't think they're using it for Waymo. I think they're using it to make their streetview images stitch together better.
surprisingly? (Score:3)
The company has a new Street View car with updated cameras, and -- surprisingly -- a set of Lidar (Light, Detection and Ranging) cans!
Who the fuck would be surprised by the company which owns Waymo using Lidar in updated Street View cars?
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Right. Dual kittens for mapping construction zone would be A surprise.
Yea. Everybody knows puppies are the industry standard.
suprisingly? Google's been doing this for 9 years (Score:1)
Who the fuck would be surprised
Apparently anyone who does not remember "2008", when Google cars first started routinely collecting 3D laser range and imaging via SICK laser scanners.
http://www.educatingsilicon.co... [educatingsilicon.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] ("Close look at Google Street View car with Laser scanners and multiple cameras")
google maps in browser (Score:1)
Since they killed the old interface and with it the "CityBlock" flash viewer, their stuff is only usable on high-end computers, and even there, the user experience is much worse than with the old viewer.
Webgl and all the newfangled javascript stuff are supposed to be better and faster than flash, what went wrong with it? What features does the typescript interface in flash offer that are not available with modern browsers in javascript + webgl? Or is it just a matter of new. less skilled programmers trying