Every single street? Rethinking full coverage across street-level imagery platforms

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

Geography

Publication Date

7-8-2019

Abstract

Street-level images taken by vehicles and pedestrians have found a role in various companies’ location-based intelligence services. Some platforms collect their images using their own cars and drivers, while others rely on crowdsourcing; however, to what extent can we expect crowdsourced approaches to reach the imagery coverage levels obtained by paid drivers? Is capturing every single street a useful or obtainable goal? We use online coverage maps to compare Google Street View, Mapillary, and OpenStreetCam in 24 major world cities and 25 differently sized cities in Brazil. We find that Google has often taken an all-or-nothing approach to collecting coverage in world cities, whereas crowdsourced platforms have achieved a more even distribution of coverage across space. Extremely low- and high-income neighborhoods are sometimes omitted due to visible and invisible barriers. Coverage patterns are influenced by how and why each company procures imagery, along with other social, economic, and geographic factors.

Comments

This article was originally published in Transactions in GIS. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Due to copyright restrictions, this article is not available for free download from ScholarWorks @ CWU.

Journal

Transactions in GIS

Rights

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Language

English

Link to Full Text
Contact Author

Share

COinS