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How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]

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Re: How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]

#21

Post by resoluteteeth »

Aachen wrote: post #8

Getting http 403 errors in NewPipe after the first minute of watching. After twitter and reddit, I guess it's time to wall another garden :( wish people would at least cross-post information to literally any other website (so there's a semblance of market forces—reasons to be nicer to use than the competition—and not just 1 place you have to use)

For their entire existence, newpipe and youtube-dl/yt-dlp have frequently stopped working and needed to be updated to deal with changes in youtube. This is nothing new; youtube was never open.

It's also not as if most other video sites provide an open api that doesn't need to be scraped

Re: How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]

#22

Post by alexdeloy »

Rainbolt is an amazing geodetective without doubt.

There was also a great talk about Overpass Turbo and related OSINT tools on the 2021 CCC Congress, also showing examples outside the US.

The talk is available in english as well: https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-2021-r3s-112-osint-ich-wei-wo-dei...

Re: How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]

#23

Post by tekla »

mavili wrote: post #16

Maybe this is common knowledge in the US, but like, you're just supposed to know what Kentucky number plates look like from a blurry image, and you're also supposed to know the logo of a sports club? Cool. Also, picture has to contain all these clues of course, conveniently, including a couple of street numbers.

Knowing things is part of skill.

Re: How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]

#24

Post by josefx »

mavili wrote: post #16

Maybe this is common knowledge in the US, but like, you're just supposed to know what Kentucky number plates look like from a blurry image, and you're also supposed to know the logo of a sports club? Cool. Also, picture has to contain all these clues of course, conveniently, including a couple of street numbers.

The main clue is knowing that Jack Harlow is from Louisville Kentucky, so he is basically guessing that the picture was also taken there and just confirming it by checking if the license plates and logos match those he can find for that area.

Re: How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]

#25

Post by newaccount74 »

HenryBemis wrote: post #3
sturza wrote: post #2

Cannot generalize outside the US

I haven't used his method (or tools) for finding locations. On his video though he does mention Austria/Vienna for museums, etc (on his screenshare), so I assume (assumption1) that if it shares data with OsmAnd (and others) it would be very useful for (anywhere) where internet is prevalent (Americas, Europe, Oceania, most of Asia).

The data is from Open Street Maps. Their data is world wide, but quality of coverage varies wildly.

Austria for example has very good maps in OSM, South Korea on the other hand has much lower quality maps (probably fewer people there using OSM)

Re: How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]

#26

Post by tjoff »

Adverblessly wrote: post #17
sellyme wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely can't work out what part of this video you think is US-specific. America is far from the only country in the world that has municipality logos on infrastructure, house numbers, or OSM coverage. There's certainly regions of the world where doing this would be much more challenging (e.g., Central Africa, China, rural India), but the stuff he covered in the video is going to be extremely helpful in the vast…

One thing I noticed that doesn't generalize is exactly those house numbers. Depending on house numbering scheme, a house number may effectively be useless. Here in Israel house numbers are just sequential and most streets aren't that long, so what are you going to do with a number like "17" which appears in almost every street in the country?

Same here, and to that I don't think I know of any municipality logos, pretty sure that is not a thing. And all license plates in the country are going to be the same.

Re: How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]

#27

Post by MontyCarloHall »

apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #15
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #14

I wonder how hard it would be to develop/train a machine learning method that ingests a photo of anywhere outside and maps it to corresponding satellite/aerial imagery. We are of course very good at object recognition from still images. We are reasonably good at inferring depth from a single still image (monocular depth estimation [0-2]). Combining these, we should be reasonably good at determining relative positioni…

There was an article about that on HN in the last few weeks. I struggled to find that specific post, but I think this is the same story. https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/15/pigeon_model_geolocat...

>The model [uses] semantic geocells – bounded areas of land, similar to counties or provinces, that consider region-specific details like road markings, infrastructure quality, and street signs

>The model can['t] pinpoint exactly where a street-level photo was taken; it can instead reliably figure out the country, and make a good guess, within 15 miles of the correct location, a lot of the time

I could imagine that a more qualitative model like this one could be used to restrict the search space of a more quantitative model akin to the one I (very roughly) proposed.

Re: How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]

#28

Post by aaron695 »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #7

Checking on numberplates and bin logos was hardly groundbreaking, as those are exactly where I would have started too. However, I had never heard of Overpass Turbo [0]. Learning of its existence was the only valuable take from this video for me, but well worth it. [0] https://overpass-turbo.eu/

[dead]

Re: How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]

#29

Post by egman_ekki »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #14

I wonder how hard it would be to develop/train a machine learning method that ingests a photo of anywhere outside and maps it to corresponding satellite/aerial imagery. We are of course very good at object recognition from still images. We are reasonably good at inferring depth from a single still image (monocular depth estimation [0-2]). Combining these, we should be reasonably good at determining relative positioni…

I think Google Maps is doing something similar where it sometimes asks you to take photos/a video of the street you’re walking on to detrmine your location more precisely (I think it happens when the GPS is not giving good enough precision).
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