Craig Robinson - Street View Scale

Google Street View began with a single video camera hand held by Larry Page. It launched in 2007 and covered 5 cities. Since then it has grown to span 7 continents and over 50 countries with 5 million unique miles driven and 20 petabytes of imagery captured. Collections now include indoor, underwater, snowmobile, backpack and bicycle. The scaling up has been a logistics and a software challenge and we will cover some of the highlights, low lights, software architectures and lessons learned in Street View and Google at large.

Craig Robinson is Senior Software engineer on the Street View team at Google. After finishing a PhD in control theory (with a fair dose of CS) he spent some time developing wireless vehicle to vehicle communication applications for Mercedes-Benz Research and Development. In 2009 he joined Street View and started work on estimating panorama location and orientation using onboard sensors (GPS, IMU, laser, wheels), computer vision (feature matches, loop closing), map matching and other hackery. He enjoys the fact that it's a multi-dimensional project that is both enabled and challenged by its scale. When he is not enjoying it, he goes running.