Patent ID: 8862500

Claim:
A method of marketing billboards, comprising: receiving a first set of images from a plurality of capture devices each positioned with respect to a vehicle in order to capture the images along a route of travel of the vehicle, each of said first set of images being tagged with geographical information corresponding to a location of the vehicle when the image was captured; extracting, by one or more computing devices, from the first set of images a second set of images each determined to contain a polygonal shape that potentially corresponds to a billboard; analyzing, by the one or more computing devices, at least one attribute of each of the second set of images to remove images having an attribute value that corresponds to an object other than a billboard; providing for display to at least one user each of the second set of images and receiving from the at least one user content information indicating whether each image contains a representation of a billboard and, for each image containing a representation of a billboard, a content of the billboard; storing the content information to at least one data store, wherein one or more advertisers are able to access billboard listing information based at least in part on the content information to determine at least one billboard on which to place an advertisement; for each image of one or more images indicated by the content information to contain a representation of a billboard, obtaining multiple images of the billboard that were captured at different times over a time period; analyzing, by the one or more computing devices, the obtained multiple images to at least determine whether the billboard is available for use by a new advertiser; and modifying, when determined that the billboard is available for use, the billboard listing information to include information that indicates that the billboard is available for use by a new advertiser when determined that the billboard is available for use by a new advertiser.