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The article discusses the various technologies and platforms used to create and maintain Google Street View. Google's initial equipment consisted of cameras, lasers and a global positioning system (GPS) mounted on a sports utility vehicle (SUV) which also carried the computers. As of June 2010, much of the imagery was produced by R5, a custom panoramic camera mounted on a fourth generation vehicle. Street View is open to user contribution and imagery is merged with other data sources. It may be used for navigation and locating buildings, among others.

We introduce the SCAPE method (Shape Completion and Animation for PEople) -- a data-driven method for building a human shape model that spans variation in both subject shape and pose. The method is based on a representation that incorporates both articulated and non-rigid deformations. We learn a pose deformation model that derives the non-rigid surface deformation as a function of the pose of the articulated skeleton. We also learn a separate model of variation based on body shape. Our two models can be combined to produce 3D surface models with realistic muscle deformation for different people in different poses, when neither appear in the training set. We show how the model can be used for shape completion -- generating a complete surface mesh given a limited set of markers specifying the target shape. We present applications of shape completion to partial view completion and motion capture animation. In particular, our method is capable of constructing a high-quality animated surface model of a moving person, with realistic muscle deformation, using just a single static scan and a marker motion capture sequence of the person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]