well there is always mapillary which only requires a single smartphone camera at the least. some people go the extra mile and mount a camera pointing each direc

well there is always mapillary which only requires a single smartphone camera at the least. some people go the extra mile and mount a camera pointing each direction, others use 360 cameras. you can also upload dash cam video and it will extract photos from it. its sort of like quantity over quality. google/apple map cars record great quality but there is too much area to cover so they can only update maybe every few years. (some places still arent on google street view yet). whereas most people have decent cameras on their phones these days so the area they travel around could potentially be updated more often, just with lower quality the photos are analysed in much the same way as described in the article... faces and licence plates are blurred, a (rough) 3d point cloud is made, street signs are analysed and objects are segmented (which they will be using for. unfortunately mapillary is not public domain but its still a better system than each company recording their own streetview data and keeping it to themselves. it just seems ridiculous for each company to put so much effort into creating a full detailed map of the world when they could all just be contributing to one map (like openstreetmap)