Diego Ripley
2.5 KiB
title, weight
| title | weight |
|---|---|
| Field Imagery | 4 |
The Mission
Commercial street-level imagery is often locked behind restrictive licenses, proprietary viewers, and paywalls, making it inaccessible for researchers, urban planners, and the general public. We are building a sovereign, open-source alternative for Canada.
By self-hosting a Panoramax instance, we provide a decentralized platform where field imagery is treated as a public utility: fully downloadable, API-accessible, and privacy-compliant.
The Infrastructure
Our field imagery pipeline is built on the Panoramax ecosystem, a federated open-source alternative to Google Street View. Instead of relying on centralized corporate servers, we operate a sovereign instance that guarantees data permanence and open access.
- Platform: Self-hosted Panoramax instance running on our internal infrastructure.
- Storage: High-performance object storage backend for hosting terabytes of 360° and flat field imagery.
- Federation: Our instance connects to the global Panoramax federation, ensuring that while the data is hosted in Canada, it is discoverable worldwide through the global
panoramax.xyzcatalog.
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, 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 standardized, web-optimized tiles for the viewer and high-resolution archives for analysis.
- Metadata Extraction: We extract and normalize/strip EXIF and GPS telemetry, indexing it into a STAC (SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog) compliant API.
Data Products
Unlike commercial platforms that only offer a "view" of the data, we provide the data itself.
- API Access: Full programmatic access via the Panoramax REST API for querying imagery by location, date, or sequence.
- Bulk Datasets: Curated dumps of street-level imagery available for computer vision training, asset management, and change detection models.
- STAC Integration: Seamless integration with geospatial workflows (ex. DuckDB, QGIS, Python, R, etc.) using the STAC standard. `