OK, let's start. I'm a Christian guest. I'm coming from France, so I have a French accent,
sorry. I'm involved in open-suit map for many, many years, and I'm here to, to, I'm here
for the first time to explain what is a new project we started, which is called Panorama
the idea of Panoramax is to create a new common, a new open database of interesting things
with a non-profit aspect in the project. The resource is a big, large growing catalogue of
street-level, ground-level pictures. The rules, which is important in a common, it's to have
open license, I've all our software stack being open, and as much as possible, use existing standard
do not create exotic stuff, and this is very important. The community, it's anybody who
respect the resource, respect the rule, it can be a public sector, it can sit my contributors,
projects sector, company, etc, etc. So, really, the project is to create a new way to share ground-level
photo pictures. So, of course, everybody has in mind Google Street View, so it's not Google,
not on these streets, and you can do much more thing than just view the picture, because if you
read the rules about Google and others, you are limited to what you can do with the pictures.
So, why? Because we really need a really open alternative to what is existing. So, all our
code is published on GitLab, and you can have a look at that. It must be independent of private
interest, by I would, etc. I'm sure you have heard of Mapidari. You may not have heard that Mapidari,
a couple of years ago, has been built by Meta, and a lot of small change happened, and it was a
bit a problem for the future to depend on that kind of things. We also want to have an open
governance, to have as much people as possible deciding, not deciding in a small team.
A very important point, I hope I have enough time to extend that, is have something decentralized,
because such a project is a storage challenge, and if one entity has to store all the picture
for all the world, it goes into a problem one day. So, we want to go in a decentralized,
federated system. An easy and full access for original picture with easy to use API to get
the picture at the access of the picture. Based on existing some parts, I already said that, and
we did not start from scratch, we reused existing code, and we improved existing code,
which is, I think, the spirit of open source really that. So, the idea is to avoid the
point of failure, that's very important. So, the original idea is not new, because it's something
I proposed to the French geographic institute in 2012. But, Mampil, I restart one year later,
I said, okay, let's go with them. We start, we proposed that again four years ago, and I
GN decided to go for it a little more than two years ago. So, it's currently funded by public
money in France. We have a small team working on the project, but with a very, very, very open
way of working. We release the first version of the platform where you can upload picture
in mid 2023. We got a grant from an internet recently to have mobile app. So, that's really the
dynamic of the project. So, how does it work? The idea, the decentralized thing,
make the ideas to have instances, and its instance is taking care of the storage of the picture
themselves. It's creating a local catalogue of the available picture and exposing that catalogue.
We also have an API and an user interface to upload picture. And we also have an API to see it
in the catalogue, and we also have a viewer to view the picture, to browse, to go from one picture
to another. One important thing is we have a blurring service, because we cannot publish picture
with people face or license plates on the car. So, we have a blurring service, and we built it
completely. We trained our own model, et cetera, et cetera. It's also something that is
completely open. So, it detects face license plates, but we also detect more like road signs.
All the model is fully open, even the data that we use to train the model. They are open,
except the one for the face detection, because of course, there's people faces in that, and
we cannot make them public. And on top of the instances, we have the panorama metacatalog,
which creates the federation between them. So, you can query the metacatalog, the same way
as you query an instance, the same API. So, one instance, how does it work? What is the
thing? You can store the picture locally on disk, or you can store that on services,
which are based on the S3 protocol. It doesn't have to be AWS. It's just the protocol.
For the S3's T-picture, there's not only S3's T-picture, there's mix of pictures, but for the
one, we are pre-cutting them to have a faster display. So, it's something that is done. We keep
all the original metadata in the picture, the location, of course, but also all the metadata
about the camera that took the picture, because it's very interesting to do a post processing of
picture to have to keep that information. The local catalogue is built on post-rescue L,
the code is Python. We have, for the API, I said we want to stick to existing standard,
and we found the standard that is called stack spatial temporal assets catalogue. It's designed
originally for AI, AI imagery, or satellite imagery, but there's an extension in that
standard for what they call perspective imagery, I call that horizontal imagery,
and not vertical. And so we stick, we try to stick as much as possible to that existing
standard. So, it's just on that supported by big names, Airbus, Maxar, Nazar,
names who already heard, I think. And as we stick to this standard, there's already
tools that works directly with what we did. The upload API is outside of stack scope, so it's
something we created from scratch. A upload, that's what most people will do with Paranox is
publishing pictures, so we have different ways to upload picture to Paranox. We have a web interface,
we have a command line tool, which is designed more, when you have mass upload, when you have
thousands, hundreds, or thousands, or even, sometimes millions of pictures to upload. It's the
good tool, and the API can be used directly. The web interface or the command line tool,
use the API and the API can be used by other application tools, etc. Mobile apps, etc.
The upload system detects duplicates, when you go around and go twice in the same place,
we detect that, it will split the upload in sequences and things like that. As we have a
decentralized system, we have different instances, and each instance can choose things like
the license. For the moment, we have two public instance, where you can upload picture,
the one from the geographic institute, IGN, and the one from append suite map friends.
The difference between them is, at least, the license on which, and on, with which you publish
the picture. For IGN, it's CC by, because it's the usual kind of license that is used by the
public sector. But for open suite map, we like the share-alike principles. So, our picture
are published in the CC by SA. With one additional thing, that we grind the right to create
non-geographic, non-photographic, derivatives like database, under CC by, or ODBL license. It's
a requirement, because if we don't have that, you can not use CC by SA picture to improve
open suite map, because the license is not compatible. Open suite map, friends, instance,
we have, okay, just to make sure I'm not too slow. It's full-bar metal option,
because cloud service is way too expensive for what we want to do. So, we have a server. It's
located in the data center near Paris. We have two 10 gigabyte fiber. It's fully second-end hardware
except the SSD with you. It's only pieces that are new. So, it's the kind of server we have been set up,
okay, total investment so far is 5,000 euro, which is not lost. And we accept
pictures outside the friends, but for testing purpose. We cannot ask millions of pictures from
everywhere. We will not have enough storage for that. And we really encourage people who want to
step in panoramic to work on setting up instances. That's really what we need right now.
It looks like that. My hardware, and when it, that's to set up in the, in the bay,
you have five of them like that. So, we can have 60 large drives in the bay. So,
currently we have 240 terabytes in the server, and we use two sort of that, and it's growing quickly.
So, the Metacatalog, as I explained, is it's what creates the federation between the server,
and so it's harvesting the server regularly every couple of minutes, because we have a different
shoulder updating system that allows not to collect all the catalogue every time. And it
messes that in one single database. It keeps on leading the metadata. There's no copy of the picture
themselves, because otherwise the Metacatalog will have another storage problem. And it provides
exactly the same stack API as the instance. And so, it creates a seamless access to all the
picture, whatever server they are located on. So, you can have a look at what it looks on
API.panorama.xyz, and I'm going to try to do a small demo.
So, as you see, the coverage is really focused on friends. And when you browse, you,
okay, by zooming in, you will find pictures, and this. So, we have not only, we have 360 pictures,
but we all have no 360 picture like this one. So, there's a real mix of kind of pictures.
Okay, try to find, you have filters. For example, it's I want to see only 360 pictures.
We also have quality score on the picture, depending on the resolution, and depending on the location
accuracy and things like that. You can also filter to see only pictures shots between dates,
etc. Oh, you can also see it for user and only see the picture that has been shared by that
user. So, you can mix all that if you want. So, if I look at that, I will have 360 pictures of the
area. And then you can move, that's the sequence, you see the blurring. So, you have more or less a global view
of, this is the part, no, I'm actually not only that, you can have access to the picture. So,
direct access to the picture is with the sharing button. You have directly to download the full
resolution picture, you can have a link to include that with a knife frame, etc. etc. You can print it
and you also have all the meta information about the picture. So, this has been shared with
GoPro Max. Okay, you have the direction, etc. etc. Okay, so this is more or less what you see on the
panoramax site. Up, I'm just okay. So, panoramax, of course, can be used to contribute to a
panoramax site map. So, we have both instance, the IGN open sheet map. One, I have compatible
license for that. And there's already integration in the OSM ecosystem. For example, the open
sheet map friends instance, to log in these instance, you simply use your open sheet map
accounts. You don't have to open an account. There is a direct access from ID, the web editor,
the web based editor in open sheet map. And there's a plot integration that is already in some
build apps like map complete. There's this poochie and every door is thinking about it. So, it's really
moving. The future is really more instances. That's really the thing we want to promote. I hope
there will be a Belgium instance very quickly. There's some French local authority who are thinking
about it. And more picture, of course, we are getting close to 50 million pictures. We, in the past
months, the rate of new picture was more or less a 3 million picture per month. More plot
options. There's already a mobile application called Baba, which is available on Android. And we
are working on a panoramax application. And, well, larger community, we also think about creating
an international federation for the project not to stay too much French centered. Do you have
questions?
Yeah, okay. Do you think it's possible to add pipelines to extracting formation from the
picture that could be useful for open sheet map? Well, it's difficult to integrate all the
kind of pipelines in the panoramax platform itself. I'm more focused on doing some extraction
of pictures in an area and doing things on that. And I think what we need to share is the trend model.
We do. If we trend model to detect transport the stops, for example, it would be nice to share
that model so that we don't have to do all over again the same thing. But then running the model
on some pictures, I think it will be something more local, not global.
Yes? Two questions. What's the use of panoramax and the second one? How easy is to host the
instance? So, do we support indoor picture? We are not against indoor picture. There's nothing
in panoramax that will detect that it's an indoor picture and will reject it. But you need to have
authorization for that because most of the time in the picture are in non-public places. So,
panoramax is limited to the public space. But if you take, for example, a trend station,
it's a space open to the public, but it's not public space. You need to have authorization.
At least in France, in other countries, I don't know. But this is one thing. And the other question
was, how is this to host? How is it to host an instance? It's not complex to set up.
It's not complex to maintain. The really difficult part is storage. Our much storage can you put
and it will be growing. So, okay, I did a calculation for France. If you want to have a full
coverage of France, then it's more or less 100 million pictures. It's more or less with redundancy
and backup one petabyte. So, how much will cost you your one petabyte? If you rent it, forget it.
If you buy it, you, if you buy it with use equipment, you can get that for 15, 20,000 euro.
Which is an investment, yes?
How do you filter the uploaded images depending on their quality? Like people don't have necessary
in the same capturing hardware. So, how do you harmonize that? Do you even harmonize it? Like
do you keep all the photos everyone sends? Yes. So, about the quality evaluation of the quality of the
picture, we accept everything. The only requirement is we need the geolocation and we need the data.
That's all. We don't ask anything more. But then, okay, we compute some quality index
and it's based on the horizontal resolution. So, if you have a very wide angle, but not a lot of pixels,
it's not as good as not that wide angle and the same amount of picture because you have more
resolution. Yes?
How do you handle up all the photos? All the photos?
I can't do the dates correctly. What could you do? Like the view does end of the upload
of the whole date of all photos correctly. Okay, dates them by the time of the upload,
the time of the 2018. What? We, about the date and old picture, we depend on the data that is in
the metadata. So, if it's wrong, it's wrong. But another question is, what to do with old picture?
Do we keep them for our long? We have no, for the moment we keep everything. And of course,
when we will be short of storage, we will have to think about it. I think it's over if you want to
meet us, we have a boost in the K building level 2. So, we have some goodies too. So, please
come and see us. Thank you.