A Behind the Scene Look at Google Maps Street View

Unveiled in May 2007, the Street View feature of Google Maps is the result of a substantial engineering effort by a team including software engineers, mechanical engineers, UI designers, computer vision scientists, operations experts, and scores of others. The initial vision for Street View was provided by Google co-founder Larry Page, who personally collected street scene videos from his moving car in order to bootstrap research in this area. Turning this initial vision into a product required developing major new pieces of technology, including robust data collection platforms (vans, cars, tricycles, snowmobiles, etc.), systems for computing accurate pose from imperfect sensors, various software components to stitch, blend, color correct and warp collected imagery, efficient systems to manage a Gargantuan flow of data, a number of systems to address privacy issues, AJAX software components to integrate Street View to Google Maps, and many others. This presentation will go over some of these components and give the audience a peek at the Street View project from behind the scene.

Presenter(s)

Luc Vincent joined Google in 2004. He is an Engineering Director responsible for a number projects centered around computer vision, including Google's Optical Character Recognition (OCR) efforts, Street View, Geo efforts around oblique imagery and 3D buildings, and several others.
Before Google, Luc was Chief Scientist, and then Vice President of Document Imaging at LizardTech, a developer of advanced image compression software. Prior to this, he led an R&D team at the prestigious Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He was also Director of Software Development at Scansoft (now Nuance) and held various technical management and individual contributor positions at Xerox Corporation.

Luc has over 60 publications in the area of vision, image analysis and document understanding. He recently served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) and for the Journal of Electronic Imaging. He has also served as chair for  SPIE's conferences on Document Recognition, the International Symposium on Mathematical Morphology (ISMM), and in the program committee of numerous conferences and workshops.

Luc earned his B.S. from Ecole Polytechnique, M.S. in Computer Science from University of Paris XI, and PhD in Mathematical Morphology from the Ecole des Mines de Paris in 1990.