Blom has successfully captured over 300,000 BlomSTREET™ single street view images for The City of Malmö, Sweden. "The City Planning and Road Department currently use the imagery in their operations, but we envisage that all departments will soon benefit from this versatile product ", says Allan Almqvist, city engineer for the City of Malmö.
BlomSTREET™ – powered by Cyclomedia, is captured from ground level, resulting in a comprehensive, high resolution and georeferenced library of 360-degree panoramic images developed for professional users. The data is provided with an easy to use software package that enables 3D measurements and visualization of 2D and 3D information directly from the imagery.
Allan Almqvist discussed Malmö’s reasoning for choosing BlomSTREET™ – “The Blom product provides many advantages over other commercially available street view imagery. Blom has provided the tools to integrate BlomSTREET™ into our general mapping portal, Malmö City Atlas. This means that all of our geographical data is visible within the same system, combining with our existing maps, orthophotos, oblique images and now street views. This vastly reduces training costs and makes it extremely easy for any of our employees to use the data.” adds Allan Almqvist.
This technology has been developed by CycloMedia and the data capture is performed by Blom using two cameras and a GPS (Globally Positioning System) mounted on the roof of a specially adapted car.
"The benefits of BlomSTREET™ are that we have full control over the frequency of capture and which streets or bicycle paths we choose to photograph. Measurement functions, metadata and the ability to add vectors directly on to the BlomSTREET™ imagery are all key elements of the products“, concluded Allan Almqvist.
Jens Ekander, an architect at Malmö City uses BlomSTREET™ every day. "Visualisation and measurements are often required to build an understanding of an existing site. So by using BlomSTREET™ I can quickly get a feel for a house or a street without the need to visit the location. For me Blom’s imagery is a great help".
Another frequent BlomSTREET™ user is Peter Ahlström, GIS Engineer at Malmö City. "Because the imagery has such a high resolution it’s very helpful in multiple situations to interpret orthophotos and field sketches. I also use the imagery for updating the primary maps, which serves as verification when I edit data from field measurements. I also make additional measurements myself, so it gives me the opportunity to see what it looks like on the ground and can therefore act as quality control"
BlomSTREET™ is available through our BlomWEB Viewer™ and BlomDESKTOP Viewer™, or alternatively via our API. For more information about BlomSTREET™, contact your local Blom office.