Hi!
It seems to me that Mapillary is blurring more and more erroneous features:
For example, the place name sign in this image:
Or the these road name signs:
Or the hotel sign in this:
I contribute to Mapillary to later derive data and insert them into OSM. This king of blurring is really annoying.
Can it be amended?
Thanks,
Andrea
It seems that Berlin street signs also started to be blurred. Example: https://www.mapillary.com/app/user/eserte?lat=52.5508804&lng=13.2584998&z=17&mapStyle=OpenStreetMap&menu=false&dateFrom=2020-04-01&panos=true&focus=photo&pKey=172760492113901&x=0.11428188127936695&y=0.5117670809814316&zoom=1.179754864576905 (should be “Straße L” and “Straße C”).
Similar erroneous blur here : Mapillary : the blurred word is BROODAUTOMAAT : a vending machine where you can get a loaf of bread when the adjacent bakery is closed.
There is a way to suggest to add blurs, but in this case I’d like to nominate a blur to be removed.
Looking at Mapillary : the name of the busstop is blurred - must be, as smaller print in destinations is readable.
EDIT (couple of minutes later) : not sure whether you’d need to blur ‘scouts’ in the sign directing visitors along a public way to the scouts hall? Blur the house number of the Scouts? See pKey=112906941807960 , but sure no need to blur part of a standard sign directing people to an AED / defibrillator?
= = =
On a different note : it would be helpful if the contributor could step through all pics they submitted that day, rather than pick each individual batch of three or ten pics?
Another example: Mapillary
Note the blurred small sign below “Landsberger Allee” — it contains the house numbers in this street segment.
(The house numbers were the main reason I made this photo, but luckily I still have the original photo available)
house numbers
Yeah, I am bothered by this for a long time too because I have also suggested to have a private 24 hour grace period for contributors to review and remove false positive blurs but to no avail. Fortunately, I keep my originals too. However, because I am unable to map everything off all of my imagery myself, some falsely blurred data will never get extracted by other mappers.
There are definitely improvements that can be made to the CV algorithms here - its a tricky problem, and something we hope to look at improving in 2024. Thanks for your patience folks.
I have had enough of this nonsense 
Why am I even documenting something if important things get blurred away by stupid AI 
Lets finally have a grace period for authors.
Stupid AI does not like animals either:
Although fish have no voice, I guess they have a right to privacy though:
However, the most severe offenses continue to be house numbers, street name signs, guide posts, and other plaques, like substation reference numbers etc. This is ridiculous, embarrassing, and discouraging.
Hi @GITNE - we hear you. There are definitely improvements that can be made to the CV algorithms here - and something we hope to look at improving in the future.
Thank you @boris. Please, do not get me wrong; I am all for AI in this context (and maybe not so much in many other contexts) because it is one of the few feasible ways to solve privacy here. What is bothering me is that we already had a working infrastructure to fix false positives and the only thing that needed to be done was to shorten the lifetime of server side originals from indefinite to like 24 hours or something (and perhaps limit this action to image authors only). Because no matter what we do no AI system is going to be perfect. AI is always going to require some sort of smart human override or intervention. Otherwise, things can get very dangerous very quickly, maybe not so much in this context but surely in many others, especially like life changing or impacting decisions.
My feeling is that the grace period was abolished as Facebook absolutely does not want to be criticised for privacy violation.
I confirm that I too. Most of the images we acquire at 360 degrees, we acquire to then map the house numbers. It happens very often that some numbers get blurred for no reason. A functionality opposite to the existing one that allows you to signal the need for further blurring would be really useful, that of signaling to remove unnecessary blurring.
The core issue of every AI solution so far is that it does not build on context but builds solely on pattern matching probability (recognition). In other words, AI does not know what a cat is because it just computes a probability score on a bit pattern that has been tagged by a conscious being with the notion of a cat. Unfortunately, that conscious being’s perception is prone to oversimplify concepts in exchange for efficiency and thus easily gives AI that false or misleading notion of intelligence. And yes, you can build hierarchies of pattern matching probabilities to sort of mimic context building in human perception but it does not solve the core issue either; it just pushes back the solution to another day, which may never come.
If that is the premise by which self-driving cars should operate and maybe because of statistically lower accident rates (only) then heaven help us.
The CIPA has added a chapter on image content annotation to its draft Exif 3.0 specification (see chapter “6. Box Format Metadata” — a horribly misleading and confusing title). And, although I do appreciate the fact that the CIPA is addressing this subject, I also do have to say that content wise and in terms of editorial quality that chapter 6 is rather mediocre at best. There is a lot of room for improvement. Imho, Mapillary developers should really comment on this draft (both substantially and editorially) before it becomes an official standard. Maybe you can adapt it to better suit your needs.
Anyway, if Mapillary (for whatever reason) does not want to enable contributors to add or remove blurs after upload, maybe contributors could annotate false positives before upload, e.g. perhaps in the Desktop Uploader?
