Design and evaluation of a low-cost street-level image capturing vehicle for south-east Asia

Street-level imaging and geo-location based services are rapidly growing in both popularity and coverage. Google Street View and Bing StreetSide are two of the free, online services which allow users to search location-based information on interactive maps. In addition, these services also provide software developers and researchers a rich source of street-level images for different purposes-from identifying traffic routes to augmented reality applications. Currently, coverage for Street View and StreetSide is limited to more affluent Western countries with sparse coverage throughout South-East Asia and Africa. In this paper, we present a low-cost system to perform street-level imaging targeted towards the congested, motorcycle dominant South-East Asian countries. The proposed system uses a catadioptric imaging system to capture 360◦ panoramic images which are geo-located using an on-board GPS. The system is mounted on the back of a motorcycle to provide maximum mobility and access to narrow roads. An innovative backwards remapping technique for flattening the images is discussed along with some results from the first 150km which have been captured from Southern Vietnam.