NEW: Automatic Horizon Leveling

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As a follow-up to NEW: Auto re-orient 360 views to the "front" and inspired by @GITNE 's suggestion, we are happy to announce that image views on mapillary.com now attempt to automatically level the image to the horizon (both for 360 and perspective images).

This functionality is powered by SfM and is useful for correcting captures that were done at an angle. For example, this capture shown in the gif would normally be askew and facing the ground, and is now aligned to the horizon. The functionality will work for all images in the catalog that have been correctly processed with SfM (most images). It is on mapillary.com only at the moment, and will be coming to the mobile clients soon.

Let us know if you run into any issues, or have comments/thoughts.

Cheers,

  • Boris
    Product Manager, Mapillary

horizon

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I am happy that you are on the job. :+1: A few key points:

  • The example :face_with_monocle: image appears to be slightly rolled to the right after horizon leveling. Perhaps this is due to SfM alignment threshold?
  • No horizon leveling seems to be applied to the panning coordinate system, which makes for a bit of a weird experience.
  • Maybe horizon leveling should not be applied on planar and fish-eye images? Looking at some other examples this latest MapillaryJS automatic horizon leveling feature on severely tilted planar and fish-eye images gives mixed results, probably depending on SfM’s ability to reconstruct a camera pose.
    AHL breaks here, probably due to lack of sufficient SfM data:

However, when SfM was able to do its job the result is impressive:

  • Drop the AHL animation because it adds no value to the user but just makes seasick. It also makes :play_button: playback wobble.
  • Please add toggles for AHL and AFVR (auto forward view rotation) because users have different needs and preferences.
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How long has this been out? I noticed the other day my captures done with my GoPro Max2 in single lens mode were bouncing around a lot when watching the capture. The camera was put slightly at an upward angle, because if it was flat it would capture the mount and inside of my vehicle.

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Thank you for the feedback as always!

@AmericanMapper - this should now be applied to all captures, so take a look at the ones you’ve uploaded on Mapillary.com and let me know if you see any issues!

@GITNE - appreciate all the feedback!

Yes, I think that’s the reason.

Could you explain more what you mean by this? Maybe with two links, one that is working as expected for you, and one which isn’t?

Could you clarify what you mean by “breaks”? When I click on that link things look OK to me.

I can’t seem to replicate wobbly playback. Do you have a video perchance?

Noted on the settings requests as well!