Is there an opensource way of making 'streetview' panoramas?

Question

I'm interested in making streetview panoramas and am curious if there are any opensource approaches that I should consider for both making and publishing these panoramas.

I've been playing with the Android functionality on my phone to make Android Photospheres (using a camera app SDK - here for the curious). These can be published in a streetview-like panorama via Google. This works, and is nifty but it requires Google to approval the panorama for it to be published online.

Another approach is to generate my own tiled grid of photos and use the google stretview api: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/streetview#StreetViewOverlays

I'd much rather produce these using some opensource tools, so I'm not completely locked into Google. In this interview with Steve Coast from OpenStreetMap, he refers to a device you can put on your phone which will result in streetview like imagery. Is there a recommended way for this imagery be collected, stored, stitched together and shared?

Answer 1

Well AFAIK there is currently no single Open Source solution for both of the steps to create an free Google Streetview replacement. But IMHO there are a few approaches that try to create some building blocks for crowdsourced/VGI approach on that topic:

1. Recording
   This includes the camera hardware, camera control and panorama stitching:

   • Frankencamera
   • Panono 360° cam (closed source) or Bublcam (closed source)
   • Canon Magic Latern Firmware
   • Hugin stitcher
     You might also checkout (near field) photogrammetry, that tries to create 3D representations of single objects or VideoMapping for collecting seemless informations.

2. Sharing
   If a crowd wants to share the results, you need a central platform that supports single steps (requesting, sharing single fotos, importing fotos, stitching panoramas, ...).

   • OpenStreetView very simple and seems to be outdated
   • OpenTrailView a new 2.0 version is WIP
   • Commons allows you to share/tag photos with geotags and semantics

Answer 2

There was a presentation at last year's State of the Map conference in San Francisco by the founder of CustomStreetView, a site that lets you use streetview imagery for adding things to OpenStreetMap (Google's licensing strictly prohibits that). You can upload your own imagery to that site. The author is on StackExchange.

Talking to him could give you some ideas!

Answer 3

There is also a new service, http://www.mapillary.com. As a cloud service not open source per se but totally crowd-driven, see e.g. http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/RCjKOg0pSUhwCzH6-3Dk6A, and active in the relevant OSS communities on contributing improvements to e.g. OpenCV, Neo4j and others.

Disclaimer - I am helping building this service.

Answer 4

You can use hugin panorama creator to stitch together a series of images as a single rectangular image.

You can use a leaflet map to display a 360 degree panorama with this image, which you can pan and zoom. You can also add markers to points of interest in the panorama.

I have written a tutorial that explains how to do this at https://peter-thomson.com/leaflet-map-tutorial/leaflet-map-tutorial-how-to-add-markers-and-popups-to-an-image-or-diagram-displayed-using-leaflet.html

Answer 5

You can use GeoVision, a rebrand of older opentrails.

It claims

Hosting and serving of geolocated pictures (like a self-hosted Street View)

https://gitlab.com/PanierAvide/geovisio

Answer 6

openstreetmap.fr now has a FLOSS solution for publishing panoramic pictures (https://panoramax.fr). Integration with a camera app is on the roadmap but not started (presentation at SOTM Europe, Antwerp 2023 - https://stateofthemap.eu/)