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Search all text in New York City

alltext.nyc

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Re: Search all text in New York City

#41
I feel like street-view data is surprisingly underused for geospatial intelligence.

With current-gen multimodal LLMs, you could very easily query and plot things like "broken windows," "houses with front-yard fences," "double-parked cars," "faded lane markers," etc. that are difficult to generally derive from other sources.

For any reasonably-sized area, I'd guess the largest bottleneck is actually the Maps API cost vs the LLM inference. And ideally we'd have better GIS products for doing this sort of analysis smoothly.

Re: Search all text in New York City

#48
post #7

GitHub of the person who prepared the data. I am curious how much compute was needed for NY. I would love to do it for my metro but I suspect it is way beyond my budget. https://github.com/yz3440 (The commenters below are right. It is the Maps API, not compute, that I should worry about. Using the free tier, it would have taken the author years to download all tiles. I wish I had their budget!)

The linked article mentions that they ingested 8 million panos - even if they're scraping the dynamic viewer that's $30k just in street view API fees (the static image API would probably be at least double that due to the low per-call resolution). OCR I'd expect to be comparatively cheap, if you weren't in a hurry - a consumer GPU running PaddlePaddle server can do about 4 MP per second. If you spent a few grand on h…

Their write up (linked at top of page below main link, and in a comment) says:

> "media artist Yufeng Zhao fed millions of publicly-available panoramas from Google Street View into a computer program that transcribes text within the images (anyone can access these Street View images; you don’t even need a Google account!)."

Maybe they used multiple IPs / devices and didn't want to mention doing something technically naughty to get around Google's free limits, or maybe they somehow didn't hit a limit doing it as a single user? Either way, it doesn't sound like they had to pay if they only mention not needing an account.

(Or maybe they just thought people didn't need to know that they had to pay, and that readers would just want the free access to look up a few images, rather than a whole city's worth?)

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