[HN Gopher] How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]
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How to find a street in 2 minutes [video]
Author : gofiggy
Score : 210 points
Date : 2023-07-28 20:31 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| Aachen wrote:
| Getting http 403 errors in NewPipe after the first minute of
| watching. After twitter and reddit, I guess it's time to wall
| another garden :( wish people would at least cross-post
| information to literally any other website (so there's a
| semblance of market forces--reasons to be nicer to use than the
| competition--and not just 1 place you have to use)
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| There's a transcript here, but not very readable:
|
| https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rl2Q9xH8e7M
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| For their entire existence, newpipe and youtube-dl/yt-dlp have
| frequently stopped working and needed to be updated to deal
| with changes in youtube. This is nothing new; youtube was never
| open.
|
| It's also not as if most other video sites provide an open api
| that doesn't need to be scraped
| DANmode wrote:
| s/frequently/occasionally
|
| Years of use, rarely isn't perfect condition.
| mavili wrote:
| Maybe this is common knowledge in the US, but like, you're just
| supposed to know what Kentucky number plates look like from a
| blurry image, and you're also supposed to know the logo of a
| sports club? Cool.
|
| Also, picture has to contain all these clues of course,
| conveniently, including a couple of street numbers.
| sellyme wrote:
| > you're just supposed to know what Kentucky number plates look
| like from a blurry image, and you're also supposed to know the
| logo of a sports club? Cool.
|
| Knowing exactly what they look like would help, but the point
| is more that you're supposed to look them up and see if they
| match to rule out regions or confirm suspicions. You've got the
| wealth of human knowledge at your fingertips, use it - if
| knowing what a Kentucky numberplate looks like might be useful,
| you can just look that up in a matter of seconds.
|
| > Also, picture has to contain all these clues of course,
| conveniently, including a couple of street numbers.
|
| Given how many times this individual has narrowed down an exact
| location from a photo of a straight road with nothing but trees
| on either side, I think it's fair to suggest that he was
| picking an easy target for the purposes of tutorialisation.
|
| It might take more than a couple of minutes to narrow down a
| photo with less obvious clues than this one, but it's fairly
| difficult to take a photograph outdoors that doesn't give away
| enough for someone with sufficient knowledge to identify
| exactly where it was taken.
| raldi wrote:
| I think one of the lessons here is how many kinds of clues like
| that there are, once you know what to look for.
| tekla wrote:
| Knowing things is part of skill.
| josefx wrote:
| The main clue is knowing that Jack Harlow is from Louisville
| Kentucky, so he is basically guessing that the picture was also
| taken there and just confirming it by checking if the license
| plates and logos match those he can find for that area.
| silisili wrote:
| I wish he'd have done a harder one. This one felt too easy,
| because you can just Google where he's from, and just Google
| search '1948 address louisville ky'.
| raldi wrote:
| I once saw a Johnny Long talk about how to do this for interior
| photos, where something like an electrical outlet or carton of
| milk can make all the difference in the world.
| netsharc wrote:
| Switzerland has a different electrical outlet to the rest of
| Europe (Type J), and an easy way to spot fake apartment
| listings is when the pictures of the apparent apartment show
| "EU" outlets (Type F).
|
| https://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plugs-and-sockets/
| teddyh wrote:
| I prefer this link:
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets>,
| since it gives more information, especially the proper names
| for the connectors, not just the IEC type code. If you want a
| more official list, use this one: <https://www.iec.ch/world-
| plugs>.
| kylecazar wrote:
| Anyone interested in this should check out GeoGuessr. Fun way to
| kill some time.
| sturza wrote:
| Cannot generalize outside the US
| sellyme wrote:
| I genuinely can't work out what part of this video you think is
| US-specific. America is far from the only country in the world
| that has municipality logos on infrastructure, house numbers,
| or OSM coverage.
|
| There's certainly regions of the world where doing this would
| be much more challenging (e.g., Central Africa, China, rural
| India), but the stuff he covered in the video is going to be
| extremely helpful in the vast majority of cases.
| pvitz wrote:
| Not exactly US-specific, but Streetview isn't available
| everywhere. How would he have found the exact location
| without it? Would be quite interesting!
| sellyme wrote:
| There's a few open data projects that provide similar
| features to Streetview and can very occasionally be useful
| in regions without coverage. But yes, typically outside of
| Streetview coverage you'll be relying on satellite
| photography, which makes things far more difficult. But
| that doesn't exactly make the advice here any worse, it
| just means that the problem you're trying to solve is
| fundamentally more challenging, so even good techniques
| might not be able to get you to the solution.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| One thing I noticed that doesn't generalize is exactly those
| house numbers. Depending on house numbering scheme, a house
| number may effectively be useless. Here in Israel house
| numbers are just sequential and most streets aren't that
| long, so what are you going to do with a number like "17"
| which appears in almost every street in the country?
| tjoff wrote:
| Same here, and to that I don't think I know of any
| municipality logos, pretty sure that is not a thing. And
| all license plates in the country are going to be the same.
| sellyme wrote:
| > so what are you going to do with a number like "17" which
| appears in almost every street in the country?
|
| Exactly the same thing that Rainbolt did in this video: cut
| down the amount of work you have to do on each street from
| checking dozens or potentially hundreds of photos/angles to
| just 1-3.
|
| Of course if you've only narrowed the streets down to
| 20,000 candidates instead of 20 of them, that doesn't get
| you straight to the answer, but it's still a massive
| proportional improvement.
|
| But the lesson being presented here is to use data that's
| available to you in the photograph. Maybe you don't have
| any street numbers (or any particularly useful ones)
| visible, but you can see the sun at the end of the road and
| therefore know that it's running directly East-West. That
| filters out tons of roads. Maybe you can see that houses
| are only on one side and a river is on the other, you can
| use that as well. In the video he mentions similar
| constraints with regards to local parks as being other
| options for this kind of search narrowing.
|
| The point of that portion of the video isn't "hope the
| house number is really weird lmao", but to extract any
| geographical information out of the image and then query
| that with open mapping databases. House numbers are just
| one of the most common ones, and while they're typically
| not quite as powerful as was shown in this video, they're
| very often going to help dramatically.
| Kiro wrote:
| You clearly don't know who Rainbolt is. He can do this anywhere
| in the world.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I haven't used his method (or tools) for finding locations. On
| his video though he does mention Austria/Vienna for museums,
| etc (on his screenshare), so I assume (assumption1) that if it
| shares data with OsmAnd (and others) it would be very useful
| for (anywhere) where internet is prevalent (Americas, Europe,
| Oceania, most of Asia).
| newaccount74 wrote:
| The data is from Open Street Maps. Their data is world wide,
| but quality of coverage varies wildly.
|
| Austria for example has very good maps in OSM, South Korea on
| the other hand has much lower quality maps (probably fewer
| people there using OSM)
| netsharc wrote:
| I wonder if the users could technically violate some S.
| Korean laws, so are wary of contributing:
|
| https://jsis.washington.edu/news/south-korean-data-
| localizat...
|
| > The purpose of the Korean Land Survey Act was to prevent
| anyone who is threat to national security from stealing the
| country's maps during the post-war period. ROK government
| enacted the law in 1961 and it concerned the establishment
| and management of spatial data -- it has subsequently been
| amended in 2009. The Article 16 of the act states strict
| regulation on taking maps, photos, the results of a survey,
| or any land surveillance data abroad, because of the
| likelihood that it could harm South Korean national
| security interests.
| alexdeloy wrote:
| Rainbolt is an amazing geodetective without doubt.
|
| There was also a great talk about Overpass Turbo and related
| OSINT tools on the 2021 CCC Congress, also showing examples
| outside the US.
|
| The talk is available in english as well:
| https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-2021-r3s-112-osint-ich-wei-wo-dei...
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| I wonder how hard it would be to develop/train a machine learning
| method that ingests a photo of anywhere outside and maps it to
| corresponding satellite/aerial imagery.
|
| We are of course very good at object recognition from still
| images. We are reasonably good at inferring depth from a single
| still image (monocular depth estimation [0-2]).
|
| Combining these, we should be reasonably good at determining
| relative positioning of identified objects in 3D, and thus
| computing their overhead 2D positions. Imagine discretizing
| overhead x/y positions, essentially yielding an image where each
| pixel corresponds to a 1 meter square looking down, whose color
| is the inferred identity of what occupies it.
|
| For example, in the linked album cover, we could infer that a
| street occupies a set of pixels with coordinates S = {(x1,
| y1),...(xN, yN)}; a building occupies pixel set B1 = {(xb1,
| yb1),...(xbM, ybM)}; another building pixel set B2; etc.
|
| Now, we are also reasonably good at object recognition (and MDE)
| for overhead imagery [3]. This would let us build a giant set of
| overhead object identities inferred from the entirety of
| satellite imagery. The tricky part would be efficiently indexing
| this, such that the overhead coordinate sets inferred from the
| ground-level image could be quickly (and fuzzily) queried in the
| satellite data. A brute-force approach would essentially convolve
| the overhead object coordinates inferred from the ground-level
| image over every region of the satellite imagery, at every
| possible angular orientation (and likely several different
| scales, since MDE is often imperfect at inferring absolute
| depth), but this would be impractically slow.
|
| I would bet that intelligence agencies have had this capability
| for some time now.
|
| [0]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095070512...
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-20909-x
|
| [2] https://keras.io/examples/vision/depth_estimation/
|
| [3] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/12/17/2719
| egman_ekki wrote:
| I think Google Maps is doing something similar where it
| sometimes asks you to take photos/a video of the street you're
| walking on to detrmine your location more precisely (I think it
| happens when the GPS is not giving good enough precision).
| praptak wrote:
| There's a separate augmented reality mode which a) captures
| frames in real time to pinpoint your position and b) displays
| the video stream with overlaid 3D markings which show you the
| way.
| Drew_ wrote:
| I _think_ this is more to do with calibrating the compass
| than precise location
| operator-name wrote:
| You may be interested in a lesser scoped project that Rainbolt
| played against: https://youtu.be/ts5lPDV--cU
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| There was an article about that on HN in the last few weeks. I
| struggled to find that specific post, but I think this is the
| same story.
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/15/pigeon_model_geolocat...
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >The model [uses] semantic geocells - bounded areas of land,
| similar to counties or provinces, that consider region-
| specific details like road markings, infrastructure quality,
| and street signs
|
| >The model can['t] pinpoint exactly where a street-level
| photo was taken; it can instead reliably figure out the
| country, and make a good guess, within 15 miles of the
| correct location, a lot of the time
|
| I could imagine that a more qualitative model like this one
| could be used to restrict the search space of a more
| quantitative model akin to the one I (very roughly) proposed.
| ThisIsMyAltFace wrote:
| I always wonder if any of the US intel agencies have reached out
| to Rainbolt for consulting or recruitment.
| Giorgi wrote:
| I bet that's his passive income
| sharkweek wrote:
| It's a meme now on his channel that he works for the CIA given
| his recent travels et al.
|
| He made a funny video about taking the "test" on the CIA's
| website which was an online game for kids (a really weird thing
| to exist when I stop and think about it).
|
| https://youtu.be/8aanIIDgm5Q
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| overpass turbo is a tool I didn't know about, which does some of
| the heavy lifting here -- and could do even more in other cases,
| his example of "skate park within 100 meters of a dog park" makes
| me think. i didn't actually realize there were public databases
| available with that kind of granularity, coverage, and coding.
|
| The ability to have ChatGTP generate the query is actually pretty
| huge.
|
| I wonder how long until there are AI tools where you can just say
| things like "give me skate parks within 100 meters of dog parks
| in Boulder CO", and it will identify the tool to use and generate
| the query and execute the query and just give you the answers.
| leokennis wrote:
| That public database is Open Street Maps which I'd describe as
| "Wikipedia for map data".
|
| It's amazing plus it's probably used in several
| tools/apps/services you use regularly.
|
| And best of all, if you have a look at the map around someplace
| you're familiar with there are probably several improvements
| and additions you can make this very day using their online map
| editor.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| I think the real discussion here should be an analysis of his
| methods of using the various online tools... his toolchain,
| essentially, and how we're rapidly accelerating processes like
| these compared to even just 10 years ago.
|
| Openstreetmap data is used in Overpass Turbo -> ask ChatGPT NLP
| into Overpass Turbo scripted API -> copy paste script into
| Overpass Turbo -> select Location data from query -> copy/paste
| coords into Google Street View images -> Matching the original
| image by eye.
|
| This part of the his search could be collapsed into a single
| tool. Or, if that is maybe too much of a specific use case,
| imagine moreso a 'workbench' tool that would put all this in a
| single place. Every time he switches chrome tabs, or
| copy/pastes... that could be taking place in a single
| environment, like a GPT4-plugin for example.
| scanny wrote:
| This seems to cover some of that workflow
|
| https://github.com/rowheat02/osm-gpt
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| Haha he's a pretty entertaining guy. Good tip on Overpass Turbo.
| It's wild that open data is full of so much stuff and enables all
| these use cases. Big fan of the tool as well.
| jokoon wrote:
| Well, this was the easy version, since there were a lot of clues.
|
| I really think those tools should be banned, they're such an
| immense security problem.
|
| I know those can be useful, and I understand that information
| should be free, but they can still do quite a good amount of
| harm.
|
| Lesson: ALWAYS blur anything that could identify a street or
| anything when you post a picture online.
| wds wrote:
| The tool is banned.
|
| Legitimate users no longer have access to it, Bad actors
| continue to use the software on their own hardware anyways.
| 63 wrote:
| But the barrier to entry to being an effective bad actor is
| much higher, and some harm is prevented even if not all.
|
| I think your point is valid to consider but it uncharitably
| overlooks the positives of the other side's proposition and
| reduces it down to all or nothing.
| operator-name wrote:
| Is it not the data that is the problem rather than the tool?
| brmgb wrote:
| Genuine question, what exactly is the security problem here?
|
| It's a set of basic techniques to find where a photo was taken.
| I have a hard time envisioning an actual new issue here.
|
| Obviously, people shouldn't post pictures of things they don't
| want other people to see or know (like where you live if you
| don't want people to know that) but that was already true
| before people could easily mine Openstreet map data.
| jokoon wrote:
| Overpass is not just "mining OSM data", overpass is quite an
| extremely efficient language and system plugged to a GIS
| database, that can be used to find a lot of things.
|
| Those things could be used by robbers or any other kind of
| people who browse photos online.
|
| Now, of course it depends on people handling their data
| straight, but since the internet is mostly used as a place
| where people share anything to the public, I still believe
| it's a bad combination of problems waiting to happen.
| ape4 wrote:
| Besides doing the OSM query his "method" is also being really
| observant and resourceful
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Checking on numberplates and bin logos was hardly groundbreaking,
| as those are exactly where I would have started too. However, I
| had never heard of Overpass Turbo [0]. Learning of its existence
| was the only valuable take from this video for me, but well worth
| it.
|
| [0] https://overpass-turbo.eu/
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| One of these I had seen had almost no hints, but it did have a
| church that was fairly close to a kfc and a dollar general or
| something. It also kind of "looked" like the southeast, so the
| dude did a general query on places where those three types of
| structures inhabited the same general area. It came back with
| about 7 or 8 results in the entire southeast which could then
| be manually checked so it seemed like being able to query the
| map did the big lifting there.
| iandanforth wrote:
| Also I would not have assumed that ChatGPT could generate code
| for such a niche tool, so that was useful as well.
| capableweb wrote:
| I mean, it's probably niche if you consider all software
| ever, but the tool has been around since 2013 at least (and
| before that under a different name, OSM Server Side
| Scripting/OSM3S), with a lot of ecosystem tools and
| documentation (in multiple languages) existing all over the
| place, I wouldn't say it's very niche in the mapping
| community.
| guwop wrote:
| I agree, GPT3.5 has been working insanely well for me when
| making overpass turbo queries. I guess there's lots of
| training data in the dataset for it. Made a quick 10 liner
| that takes in a bbox & search prompt -> GPT3.5 -> overpass
| turbo -> geojson
|
| i.e. "banks in my area" a la google maps here:
| https://i.imgur.com/pSRn1xo.png
|
| In my experience it seems like prompting for older
| technologies works much better on large LLMs, i guess it
| makes sense considering that there is probably more
| crawlable documentation out there
|
| EDIT: someone in this thread linked a tool which seems to
| do this: https://github.com/rowheat02/osm-gpt
| dav_Oz wrote:
| Basically, that is the gist of the vid, the rest is more or
| less common sense, I guess.
|
| A short & catchy variation of "Overpass turbo - a super
| powerful mining tool for OSM" would be a more appropriate title
| [0][1]. It exists since 2013 but got a massive boost from the
| Pokemon Go craze in 2016 [2].
|
| [0]https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_turbo
|
| [1]https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API
|
| [2]https://www.itechpost.com/articles/34612/20160930/pokemon-
| go...
| wfleming wrote:
| And in this case I think it would have been a lot of work to
| identify the number plate & bin logo if he hadn't already had
| enough context to make a probable guess. The source image he
| was working from looked pretty low-res, that license plate was
| just a couple white-ish pixels. Like you, I hadn't heard of
| overpass turbo and that looks super cool, but the rest of it
| was "how to confirm what you already mostly know".
| Morizero wrote:
| It's a surprising helpful tool in Pokemon Go metagaming. For
| example, you can use it to determine gyms eligible for EX Raid
| status (not that that's a thing anymore), find potential micro-
| nests, or even locate Lake Trio spawn locations.
| pests wrote:
| This comment has no valuable take.
| jader201 wrote:
| I think it does: It saves watching the video by providing a
| link to a tool that he mentions that many might not have
| heard of.
| [deleted]
| shlubbert wrote:
| How dare someone _mention some common sense tips_ as a tiny
| part of a video. Shameful!
| ragebol wrote:
| I'm thinking of a new game: write the shortest Overpass Turbo
| query that yields, say, 1 result for eg. your country.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| kasperni wrote:
| If you a new to GeoGuessr this is probably a more interesting
| video from the author [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p5Eb4OSZCs
| qalter wrote:
| I have a lot of old pictures without geolocation data. A tool to
| automatically add even an estimate of the location would be
| really useful so that apple or google photos could use it to make
| albums automatically.
|
| PIGEON is going that way I guess:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.05845
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(page generated 2023-07-30 23:01 UTC)