Mapillary open sources 25k street-level images to train automotive AI systems

As more companies wade into the business of building artificial intelligence systems to help you drive (or do the driving for you), a startup founded by an ex-Apple computer vision specialist is open sourcing a huge dataset that can help them on their road to autonomy. Mapillary, a Swedish startup backed by Sequoia, Atomico and others that has built a database of 130 million images through crowdsourcing -- think open-source Street View -- is releasing a free dataset of 25,000 street-level images from 190 countries, with pixel-level annotations that can be used to train automotive AI systems. The Mapillary Vistas Dataset claims to be "the world's largest, most diverse dataset for object recognition on street-level imagery." As with the rest of Mapillary's photos, the startup builds its image database on top of Mapbox and OpenStreetMap maps. The dataset is free for both academic and commercial researchers, and if anyone wants to build the results into commercial products, they must pay a commercial license.