page_title: Google Street View
section_title: Data capturing equipment
hierarchical_section_title: Google Street View / Data capturing equipment
caption_attribution_description: English: Google Street View trike near Siam Park in Adeje, Tenerife. Español: Triciclo de Google Street View. Deutsch: Google-Street-View-Dreirad
context_page_description: Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expanded to include cities and rural areas worldwide. Streets with Street View imagery available are shown as blue lines on Google Maps.
  Google Street View displays panoramas of stitched images. Most photography is done by car, but some is done by tricycle, boat, snowmobile, and underwater apparatus, as well as on foot.
context_section_description: Cameras: Street View imagery has come from several generations of camera systems from Immersive Media , Point Grey Research (now FLIR Systems)  and developed in-house. The cameras contain no mechanical parts, including the shutter, instead using CMOS sensors and an electronic rolling shutter. Widely deployed versions are:
  R2: the earliest after Immersive Media, photos were captured with a ring of eight 11-megapixel CCD sensors with commercial photographic wide-angle lenses, cameras with the same specifications as those used for the Google Books project.
  Ladybug2 cameras (resolution 1024 x 768 pixels) by Point Grey Research.
  R5: uses a ring of eight 5-megapixel CMOS cameras by Elphel with custom low-flare lenses, plus a camera with fisheye lens on top to capture upper levels of buildings.
  R7: is the first completely in-house built camera, it uses 15 of the same sensors and lenses as R5, but no fisheye effect.
  2017: uses 8 20MP cameras. Includes two facing left and right to read street signs and business names.
  Positioning: recorded photographs must be associated with accurate positioning. This is done via a Global Positioning System, wheel speed sensor, and inertial navigation sensor data.
  Laser range scanners from Sick AG for the measuring of up to 50 meters 180° in the front of the vehicle. These are used for recording the actual dimensions of the space being photographed.
  LIDAR scanners from Velodyne were added in the 2017 update. Mounted at 45° to capture 3D depth information, and used for additional positional information.
  Air quality: In September 2018, Google announced it would integrate air quality sensors from Aclima into its global fleet of Street View vehicles.
  Vehicles: data recording equipment is usually mounted on the roof of a car. A Trike (tricycle) was developed to record pedestrian routes including Stonehenge, and other UNESCO World Heritage Sites. In 2010 a snowmobile-based system captured the 2010 Winter Olympics sites. Trolleys have been used to shoot the insides of museums, and in Venice the narrow roads were photographed with backpack-mounted cameras, and canals were photographed from boats.
  A portable backpack-mounted Google Trekker is used in outdoor terrain. For instance, the six main paths up Snowdon were mapped by the Google Trekker in 2015.
caption: A Google Street View trike
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