Street View camera rigs do much more than just take photos

https://www.trekview.org/blog/2019/google-street-view-cameras-more-than-meets-the-eye/

189 150 6 years ago

alufers2• 6 years ago

I wonder if all the tech in those cars requires modifications to the vehicle itself, like a larger alternator to satisfy the power requirements or reinforced pillars to support the weight of the hardware. It'd be cool to hear from somebody who knows how they equip those cars.

barbegal2• 6 years ago

Those modifications seem unlikely, You can't easily reinforce pillars in a car and they are designed to support the full weight of the car in a roll-over situation so a few 10s of kgs of equipment on the roof make little difference. Similarly, a typical alternator is rated to 2kW so far above the required power of a few LIDAR, camera and computing devices. Having said that, early vehicles did have heavy duty alternators installed (although they may have confused these with heavy duty inverters which are needed) and modified suspension components [1]

[1] https://pub-tools-public-publication-data.storage.googleapis...

jeffbee3• 6 years ago

The linked history of street view does mention that the first instance had an alternator “from a fire truck”.

kube-system• 6 years ago

A typical alternator for a small car is rated for something like 60-120 amps, which at a typical 14v output, is 0.8 to 1.7 kW.

2kW falls into more of a light truck or high-output category.

dsfyu404ed• 6 years ago

A modern car will run into suspension wear/longevity problems long before the pillars care about how much weight you put on them. This hardware is tens, maybe a couple hundred pounds. Roofs can support thousands without deformation. The vehicle will suffer increased tire/suspension wear and "bad to the point of it being hard to justify not using a bigger vehicle" handling long before the structure is in any way affected. They stack cars on cars at many junkyards and the lower cars are just fine save some scratches and dents to the roof skin.

t0mas882• 6 years ago

There are a lot of companies that do this type of vehicle modification for you. It's common for a lot of professional-use vehicles also in construction / utility network maintenance etc.

As others said, the roof is fine. The suspension is quite easy to adjust a bit for the extra weight and that helps also in stability due to the weight being high-up. For vehicles commonly used in these kinds of things there are higher rated alternators and batteries that are drop-in replacements for the standard one.

TeMPOraL• 6 years ago

that helps also in stability due to the weight being high-up

I don't understand that. Isn't weight high-up shifting the center of mass upwards, making the vehicle less stable?

EDIT: jstanley, olex: that makes sense, thanks!

shadowgovt25• 6 years ago

I don't know about the street view cars, but the waymo vehicles have cooling and power run through the pillars to the camera, because the camera has to be cooled.

This information was disseminated to fire departments so that if rescuers have to cut somebody out of one of waymo's cars, they don't accidentally cut through a pressurized coolant line.

dexen• 6 years ago

Cars are typically specced to handle 75kg (~165lb) of baggage on roof rack without breaking a sweat. Think carrying skies + personal gear on a trip across Europe. And if you are concerned about momentum, please note it's common to carry two bicycles on a roof rack; with speeds of 100km/h+ they generate substantial forces due to drag and in case of cornering.

I doubt the whole camera+lidar roof package is anywhere near close; best guess around 10kg (~22lb)

Shivetya• 6 years ago

3 times the weight of the car, 1.5x for large vehicles, is a US requirement to how much the roof can support, this is part of protecting occupants during a roll over; this was from 2010 and may have new requirements[0][1]

[0]https://www.martindale.com/antitrust-trade-regulation-law/ar...

[1]https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2010/04/nhtsa-decli...

aidenn0• 6 years ago

That's a static load; the actual amount of luggage a car is rated for carrying on the roof is much less (usually somewhere in the mid 100s for a passenger vehicle).

Spooky23• 6 years ago

Usually any vehicle mods are done to meet bare minimum standards.

A lot of the mapping cars I see are hybrids, they probably get some lower benefit there.

I would assume they run these things for a fixed period and toss them to avoid opex. I’ve had exposure to lots of commercial customized vehicles, and unless it’s required by law or the use case, not an extra dime is spent.

Peer_to_Peer• 6 years ago

I design mobile mapping vehicles for a different company, so while I can't answer specifically about the Street View system, I might be able to provide some insight.

Our smallest portable system weighs around 25lbs and can mount to just about any vehicle using strong magnets or standard roof rack. It pulls less than 10 amps so it can be powered through a standard cigarette lighter outlet or wired directly to the vehicle's battery.

Our largest system weighs many hundreds of pounds and mounts on one specific vehicle in as many reinforced locations as possible. We utilize factory bolt holes on the roof, make custom brackets to support cantilevered weight off the back, and make modifications to the roof up front to support even more weight. The system typically pulls 40-50 amps however, the vehicle comes with a high output alternator and dual battery system from the factory so we don't need to upgrade them.

Based on the components of the current Street View system, a roof rack is sufficient to support it's weight. I'm guessing it pulls around 20 amps so it likely has a direct connection to the vehicles battery, but wouldn't require an alternator upgrade.

alufers2• 6 years ago

Thanks for the valuable insight, 50 amps look like the sort of current you would see while a car's starter motor is running. Out of curiosity, do you shut down the equipment automatically when the engine is killed? I imagine drawing so much current may interfere with the starter motor.

steerablesafe• 6 years ago

Relevant xkcd (alt text): https://xkcd.com/1204/

lalos• 6 years ago

They have been previously used to collect SSID names and other WiFi network metadata. See https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/

ForHackernews2• 6 years ago

Not just metadata: Wasn't the controversy that they were sniffing data packets, too?

uptown• 6 years ago

Yup: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/

shadowgovt25• 6 years ago

Yes, the firmware had been configured for open logging and was slurping the packets and dumping them to a debug file.

barbegal2• 6 years ago

Yes but (if we believe they are telling the truth) this was only done accidentally and they only intended to sniff the SSIDs. https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collec...

jetrink• 6 years ago

I remember the outrage that this revelation generated and I am still stumped by it. First, the probability that a Google car happens to capture sensitive information as it drives past your residence once per year is basically zero. Even if it did, it would still require detective work to correlate it to you specifically. Second, if you are worried about people recording data broadcast by your WiFi router, it's up to you to secure your network. I would be much more concerned about a neighbor snooping on my traffic. What did people imagine that Google was doing with these random snippets of data?

MertsA2• 6 years ago

To add to the other responses, the reason why they were capturing sensitive data was most likely because instead of doing filtering and processing live while they were driving around they chose to just deal with that after the fact and process the WiFi data through whatever system they already had for post processing. Even with just recording the SSIDs and timestamps on the vehicle all of the data that was controversial would still be captured by the radio on the vehicle, it would just be discarded immediately instead of being discarded when the Google maps vehicle offloaded that data for processing. If Google wanted to do something nefarious, they could still turn it back on all in software. The only real privacy gain is that they can't retroactively do it but I doubt even originally that they kept the packet dumps around for too long after processing it.

panoramas4good4• 6 years ago

Thanks for the tip. I have update the post to include this info.

sorenjan• 6 years ago

You could also add this video showing the optimization of a GPS track if you want some visualization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z00ORu4bU-A

ethanbond4• 6 years ago

I think "accidentally" is potentially giving Google too much credit/benefit of the doubt as far as capture of packets.

They hired a famous wardriver, Marius Milner, onto Street View (then later Niantic, maker of the privacy-intrusive Pokemon Go).

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

But 'secrecy is not security'. This nonsense about 'hiding' the SSID is foolishness. For the reason I just gave. Plus, now, when anybody IS connecting, they're 'probing' that SSID by spamming every channel with the SSID. Like hide-n-seek where your little brother won't shut up and keeps saying "Are you still in the closet Fred? Are you? I'm under the bed! We're being secret!"

So no, masking the SSID in your router isn't doing anything.

msla3• 6 years ago

Plus, there's an obvious security hole: Any access point can say "Yes, I'm that access point you're looking for! Please do your banking through me! I'm ever so much not a malicious system spoofing your laptop by lying to it!" precisely because the laptop has to ask for the SSID, and those questions, the probe requests, are not encrypted.

war1025• 6 years ago

As some with three little kids, that analogy was just great. A daily occurrence at our house.

bo1024• 6 years ago

Security and privacy are different things; both important. Also, lots of information that is not so dangerous on an individual or neighbor level can be exploited at scale.

mavhc• 6 years ago

I assume they're using them to make global HD maps for Waymo too

tyingq4• 6 years ago

I wonder what the total "BOM" cost per street view vehicle is.

jeffbee3• 6 years ago

$20k-$60k. https://www.trekview.org/blog/2019/history-of-google-street-...

tyingq4• 6 years ago

Interesting, though that seems to be the camera system cost only.

barell• 6 years ago

It says DGPS (Digital Global Positioning System) is it the same as Differential GPS?

Someone1234• 6 years ago

The article just got it wrong, their source is about Differential and they put "Digital" instead.

panoramas4good4• 6 years ago

Author here. That was a typo. Should read Differential GPS. Now corrected. Thank you!

yters3• 6 years ago

If the CIA was driving down US streets photographing, scanning and sniffing everything, I think we'd have a different reaction. At least with Google we know all the data is in good hands.

jrockway2• 6 years ago

Ultimately, the Constitution protects your right to photograph public places. Street View is keeping that freedom alive by exercising the right; if someone wanted to make it illegal and the law was on their side, they could make plenty of money by going after Apple and Google. That protects us ordinary folks.

A couple years ago I got yelled at for taking this picture: https://petapixel.com/2016/08/11/dont-think-port-authority-w...

I told the guy that Google has plenty of pictures of the Holland Tunnel and that if it were so illegal, the lawyers probably would be going after them. They aren't, which is pretty telling as to where they think the law actually is.

chillingeffect3• 6 years ago

This legality deserves reconsideration in today's technology:

To an individual taking pictures, the public is no great resource and can not be significantly used as a source of asymmetric power. An individual's "public" is a small sphere around them as far as an affordable camera can see.

To nation-states and large corporations, the "public" becomes virtually all of the spheres around every individual. It can be combined into a database which is no longer accessible to the individuals in the database, making it no longer public. It can then be used asymmetrically by the organizations against individuals. For example, mass-gathered public real estate information can be pitted against individual buyers and sellers of their homes. It biases the market toward those who can collect the most information using capital an individual with a single camera could never collect. In the case of google streetview, a monopoly has been formed.

When our country was formed, such asymmetric power was scarcely imaginable. We need to reconsider whether mass gathering of information should be allowed.

propogandist• 6 years ago

Did you forget that Keyhole, which became Google Earth and Maps, was acquired by Google from the CIA's venture capital firm In-Q-Tel?

https://www.iqt.org/google-acquires-keyhole-corporation/

yters3• 6 years ago

Nope. Same point there.

gt2• 6 years ago

Think he was being sarcastic.

callalex• 6 years ago

To me it’s a cost/benefit compromise. I really go out of my way to make sure I use exactly zero google products, but I think the utility that Street View provides to the average citizen is quite sizeable and cannot just be dismissed. However the CIA would never provide this utility to the average person, they keep everything they touch for themselves like a dragon on a pile of gold.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 6 years ago

At least with Google we know all the data is in good hands.

... /s ? Please?

freefriedrice3• 6 years ago

The camera acronym is "SICK"? As a sales rep, that would be a tough one to pitch. Like Moland Springs water.

detaro• 6 years ago

No, that's the name of the company making them, named after the last name of the founder.

freefriedrice3• 6 years ago

Well now I feel like a dolt.

rsanek• 6 years ago

This should have a label of (2019) -- article is nearly 5 months old now.

lonk• 6 years ago

...accidentally, in some cases collecting network data packets...

ethanbond4• 6 years ago

As I note above, Google hired a wardriving expert onto Street View. Assess for yourself how accidental you believe that collection to be.

jb7752• 6 years ago

"Accidentally" collected network packets (including traffic on the network, websites being visited, etc)..... whoops!

shadowgovt25• 6 years ago

TBF to Google, that's something anyone can do. If a person really doesn't want their activities known, it's incumbent upon the person to not do those activities over an unsecured wifi network. That's the radio equivalent of shouting your browsing history in public.

(This is one of the oldest privacy arguments and extends outside the radio spectrum. Philosophically, if you stand naked at your own bay window and I walk by on the street and chance to spy your genitals, and the fact they were seen bothers you, who screwed up here?)

jb7752• 6 years ago

Well if I'm walking up to everyone's bay window taking nude pics of them, then saving the pics to a server that would eventually be linked up with their personal accounts....I certainly wouldn't claim it to be an "accident".

yjftsjthsd-h3• 6 years ago

I'm torn on this. On the one hand, yes, it's easy to see accidentally recording when they really didn't mean to. On the other hand, have you ever heard of Google recording less data or giving people more privacy by accident? If "mistakes" always favor one party then it seems fair to start blaming them. On the third hand, would you hear about that if it happened? I mean, what would that look like? "Oh, today's ads are slightly less targeted"? "Oh, Google location services doesn't automatically place me by my wifi WAP"? Negatives aren't just hard to prove; they're hard to see in the first place.

So I'm skeptical, but I don't know how to have enough data to really be sure.

lihaciudaniel• 6 years ago

This is genuinely creepy for that wifi names can lead to finding the person's name and thus you have found to a few minorities their location, and name. And also for local businesses you can now track and use that data forgood or bad.

TaylorAlexander2• 6 years ago

Hey that main website is cool! [1]

I literally just ordered a GoPro Fusion last night so that I can create 3D captures of hiking trails using photogrammetry. I will then use the 3D trail models for reinforcement learning for my off road robot. [2]

The basic pipeline is images to Meshroom (perhaps with pre-processing since Meshroom doesn't seem to support 360 cameras), then instant-meshes to reduce the poly count of the mesh, Blender to map the texture on to the new low poly mesh, save as .glb file in Blender, then open in habitat-sim for machine learning. Blender was the hardest part to learn, but tutorials on youtube walk through the whole process.

Interestingly the GoPro Fusion is pretty cheap now, as GoPro has a new model which is apparently not much of an improvement. So while the new model is $499, the Fusion is currently $179 on Amazon.

Previously I have tried photogrammetry of trails with cell phone video. It works really well but the narrow field of view of the cell phone camera compared to the whole 360 degree scene means the resulting 3D reconstruction has lots of holes, and the model is only well reconstructed immediately around the trail - wider terrain is missed.

The 360 camera captures all angles, front and back, sides and top. It should make for some fun immersive video to throw on youtube but it will also be great for photogrammetry. I found this research paper [3] which supports my thinking that 360 cameras are useful for photogrammetry.

[1] https://www.trekview.org/trek-pack/

[2] https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/

[3] https://www.int-arch-photogramm-remote-sens-spatial-inf-sci....

panoramas4good4• 6 years ago

Thanks!

Would love to hear more about your project. Sounds very cool.

We're working on some computer vision problems (we plan to open-source soon). Perhaps there's an opportunity to collaborate? https://www.trekview.org/greenhouse/

Drop me an email dgreenwood at trekview dot org.

TaylorAlexander2• 6 years ago

They that looks like something I want to do too! I like the idea of my robot being able to identify all the native plants around it. My mom is a landscape designer and she knows the latin names for almost every plant we come across, so it's something I want to support in my robot. I'd love to collaborate! I will email you. :)

Street View camera rigs do much more than just take photos

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