Mapillary, a company that aims to make the world accessible to everyone via crowd-sourced photos, is opening a new research lab in Graz, Austria, which will focus on advanced computer vision to enhance the image recognition technology at the company, which is building a rival to Google’s Streeview based on crowd-sourced photos.
Peter Kontschieder, a Microsoft Research Cambridge veteran who last year received a Marr Prize in machine vision for developing a new technique for teaching computers to recognize images in a paper titled “Deep Neural Decision Forests,” will head the lab with Gerhard Neuhold, a computer vision engineer formerly at Microsoft Research who previously worked on both recognition algorithms and on building street view camera rigs.
The team specializes in object recognition and semantic segmentation, which according to Mapillary, means that objects are recognized and labels assigned to each region in the photos. The team will deploy this globally across all 60 million-plus photos on Mapillary in order to improve the ability of machines to analyze images, and will make this data available to members.
Since launching in late 2013, according to Arctic Startup, Mapillary has mapped a million miles of roads with 61 million photos, and has machine vision technology that stitches those images together to create immersive ground-level maps and constructs locations in 3D. The company recently raised its $8 million A Round from Sequoia, Atomico, LDV Capital and PlayFair, aiming to surpass Google’s coverage in the next three years.
Jan Erik Solem, CEO of Mapillary, commented in the official press release. “Graz has a thriving cluster of artificial intelligence research and talent, so it was a natural choice for us,” said Solem. “We are excited to have Peter lead our deep learning team, and we will grow the team there to further improve our ability to extract useful data from images.”
Kontschieder also commented on the announcement: "I'm excited to further our research in computer vision and deep learning with Mapillary because our work will directly impact Mapillary's community and customers," he said.
Pictured: A Mapillary image of Graz, Austria
View the official press release.
View the Mapillary blog post on the announcement.
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