How are panoramas Yandex

This weekend edition moscowwalks.ru had a unique opportunity to ride with the crew, to shoot the process from the outside and the inside of the machine, and just talk and get to know many interesting technical details and the details of offscreen.

Then you can see some photos and read about how it all removed and what happens during the shooting.





Many residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg have already seen this car, slowly passing on every street. The crew, as you see, is not encrypted. The machine labels. The machine itself is also often photographed passers-by. Yes, and when you go inside you realize that all turn on you.

This weekend we went on Sviblovo. The company's plans should cover 90% of the streets of Moscow.



Shooting is conducted simultaneously on several ordinary SLR with wide angle lens. Of course, one of the most difficult moments here is accurate sync shutter. Unlike Street View by Google, are not removed videos and photos in high quality. Gluing in the pan then carried out in an automatic mode with the help of specially developed software.



All photos contain information with the exact coordinates of the location shooting for the subsequent reference to the map. Here some data from the GPS is not sufficient as this system may be delayed a little and not give the coordinates to within a meter, so take into account the additional speed. Finally, the exact location is calculated based on the speed data is taken directly to the car's wheels. You can shoot at speeds up to 60 km / h.

Installation is being constantly improved, as can be seen clearly by the example of the quality of older panoramas center of Moscow and later on the outskirts.



Of course, the survey is conducted or a weekend morning or on weekdays when traffic on the streets is minimal.



In Moscow, sometimes dusty and dirty, so at each stop have to wipe the lens.
Shooting is conducted only on dry asphalt in good weather, as when driving on wet climb a suspension and a fine spray that immediately settle on the lenses.

The greatest evil in this case are the watering machines ...



So the process of shooting looks inside. On your phone, Yandex Map with GPS. The notebook system itself.
A bunch of wires under your feet is the unit that processes signals from the cameras, GPS, information from the wheels and the like

In the hand of the operator console, he can be forced to make the frame at the same time all the cameras at the right time. For example, when critical to the panorama was exactly in the middle of the intersection, or if the car drives past something interesting.



The system is on the laptop looks like.



Green lines - something that is necessary to capture the plan, the red line - the current shot, black lines - already captured.
The operator tells the driver how fast to go, where to stay, where to turn.
With the notebook set shooting settings, the interval of automatic capturing (in meters, in this case is 50 m, the narrow streets could be 10 m, on the road and 100 m is enough), exposure compensation, and other information about the location, the length of the current survey and etc. Shows the latest pictures taken with the camera.
The parameters are adjusted so that there is no strong differences in brightness between the sky and the houses.



Yandex Panorama greatly help to update the map. During the hour until we went near Sviblova twice as much as we ran into inaccuracies in the maps either lane closed block of reinforced concrete and no through traffic, or entry into the alley is not in the place where shown on the map.



Although the weather was dry and the dirt in the streets did not have lenses still had to constantly clean



The machine is mainly people react positively. Photographed and photographed with her often. Security sometimes looks suspicious. Sometimes workers stopped traffic police, but mostly out of curiosity.
Sometimes it happens that people are outraged. Indeed, Google on their panoramas glosses over all persons and numbers, and Yandex is not.
Why?
The fact that US laws require gloss over rooms and people without any reservations, and Russian legislation there is a reservation: in principle, a person also can not be removed, it is also considered an invasion of privacy, but if a person is not the main subject, it is possible.
In this case, people are not removed, and the streets.



Widely known became the funny here the panoramas Peter:

This is in contrast to the random jokes, of course, was specially rigged.
The plans to do similar "Easter eggs" in the future.
Google even created a community where the plan lays out surveys and routes, and only interested in the people on the ground in front of the machine themselves excrete scenes.

During one of the shootings at a gas station talking to the motorcyclist, who offered to "show class". When the car went on to shoot a motorcyclist swept past her at high speed while standing on the rear wheel.

Recently, during a shooting in the area of ​​Khodynka field operator he noticed that the field comes some event. They came and talked, got a "good" and as a result filmed Festival airbrushing in cars.

All of this will be on Yandex maps for the new season.



I specifically asked to cover any numbers, and received the answer that the car has photographed many times that simply do not make sense.
On this machine, the shooting was carried out in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Plans to run several machines.

What is interesting in Kyiv had to put the equipment on another machine. Only for one reason: the moment the elections took place in Ukraine and the car with Russian numbers and "spy equipment" inevitably would attract attention, so use the local machine.

via moscowwalks.ru



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