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Locating a Photo of a Vehicle in 30 Seconds with GeoSpy
- moltar 10mo agoBut who takes the photo of the stolen car?
- kube-system 10mo agoThe thief, when selling it.
- Scoundreller 10mo agoI’d be lying if I said I never ripped photos from listings on a certain popular online auction platform when selling stuff online (before the ubiquity of digital cameras and smartphones)
- kachapopopow 10mo agoLooking back it used to be way less advanced than what they have now, makes me wonder how this compares with flock.
- avidiax 10mo agoWondering how theives can sell a stolen car. Do they have fake paperwork?
- kachapopopow 10mo agofrom what I know they sell it to other criminals which use it to commit further crimes or ship it off the continent most commonly it is used for drugs in canada since every case I hear about ends up in forensics
- RobotToaster 10mo agoIn some cases the car is completely disassembled and the parts are sold.
- hattmall 10mo agoYes, the term is strykers. Which can refer to the person that does it, or the actual stolen car that has been legitimized. The stryker will find or buy from somewhere, a pool of unissued VINs that don't flag anything in the state registration system and match various vehicles (Dodge Chargers, Kias, Hyundais). Then when someone comes with that vehicle, they will strike a new Vin plate. Sometimes if they buy the VINs it will come in a package with plates. From there it's possible to get the vehicle registered, most likely under someone else's name that has no idea and they will sell / rent the car with tag etc. Though sometimes they will just make a fake plate too and then steal a real plate, swap it with the fake plate and put the real plate on the stolen car and sell it like that. In some cases / states they can actually get a title reissued. Boats are even better, but much smaller market, just look up coast guard plates on Amazon. Stiker vs Styker, is regional. For Reference: Striker Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTxkD5JFpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTxkD5JFpg
- vablings 10mo agoUsually in the sophisticated thieves, it's the case that they buy a VIN from a car that was exported and not recorded as such. They then get a new copy of the title for a car that is no longer in the country and can request new factory stamped vin parts such as the suspension pillar. The car looks completely legitimate to your average person with matching VINs it's just there are now two cars in two different places
- barbazoo 10mo agoExported but not recorded, wouldn’t that be a stolen car? If so the VIN prolly can’t be reused. Or is there a legit way this would happen? Who else exports their car, doesn’t report it and then offers their VIN?
- xp84 10mo agoI happened to see a video yesterday, unsourced though, which said that for cars that fetch a high premium overseas, exporters hire "straw buyers" to buy the cars and register them, then immediately take them to the port to be exported. So, those seem like they'd be pretty good ones to use, as the straw buyer would certainly not report it as stolen. Though I bet they don't renew the tags, so you might owe a couple years of back registration depending on how old the 'source' car is.
- lukax 10mo agoYou can buy a totaled car for cheap and use its VIN.
- hangonhn 10mo agoAre VINs not tied to the make, model, and year?
- kube-system 10mo agoUltimately they are tied to an individual vehicle in its original configuration in every way. But thieves don't really really care about what it technically represents, they are more interested in what they can get away with. That would be solely dependent on how stringent the inspection is to get a rebuilt title.
- xp84 10mo agoSure, but that's not that hard to find a match of. And if you cover all your bases, you can probably get away with a year or two plus or minus in most cases.
- kube-system 10mo agoThe easiest way is to sell it at a steep discount to a buyer willing to accept the lack of paperwork for a good deal.
- w-ll 10mo agoHa, the first photo is Alamo Square looking up Fulton.
- stronglikedan 10mo ago> Thieves often post stolen vehicles for sale on platforms like Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist That seems like a stretch. That wouldn't even make sense for them to do. Strange claim to make.
- tokai 10mo ago>The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is urging New York City residents to exercise caution when purchasing cars online, as they have recently identified a surge in the sale of stolen vehicles. >As of Oct. 15 (2024), the DMV reports that it has recovered 228 stolen vehicles amounting to a value of $6.35 million. Of the 228 vehicles recovered this year, 149 were purchased by an unsuspecting victim after seeing a post on Facebook Marketplace or a similar site. That is 65% of recovered stolen vehicles in New York was sold through online marked places. https://www.silive.com/crime-safety/2024/10/stolen-vehicles-being-sold-online-heres-how-to-avoid-buying-one.html https://www.silive.com/crime-safety/2024/10/stolen-vehicles-...
- galleywest200 10mo agoI am curious of 1) How many total stolen vehicles there were And 2) If 65% of recovered ones being from Marketplace means only the low-hanging fruit were found.
- snypher 10mo ago"From 1997 through 2022, reported thefts decreased 67 percent. In 2022, however, there was a dramatic increase in vehicles reported stolen: 26,653, representing a 112 percent increase from the 12,573 reported stolen in 2019." From https://apps.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/docs/FINAL%202022%20MVTIFP%20Annual%20Report.pdf https://apps.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/docs/FINAL%20202...
- burkaman 10mo agoIt's very common with bikes, it wouldn't surprise me if they do it with cars too. I found my own stolen bike for sale on Facebook but still wasn't able to recover it. They just use a stolen or anonymized Facebook account so you can't easily figure out who is selling it.
- kotaKat 10mo agoSounds more like “vehicle recovery” for the repossession market first and foremost. A repo investigator for the bank locates the target vehicle via owner’s social media, takes photo of the car, shoots it into GeoSpy, then ganks the car based on given locations in the owner’s photos. Pair it up with ALPR hits across a city from national ALPR networks (to help correlate home/business/work patterns) and… wellp, there you go!
- catapart 10mo agoYou can even skip the investigator in a lot of places, thanks to Flock. Dystopian.
- breppp 10mo agowouldn't it be cheaper to just buy your location from a data broker?
- reaperducer 10mo agoYou can even skip the investigator in a lot of places, thanks to Flock. Dystopian. Flock is an ALPR.
- pugworthy 10mo agoSure, an impressive bit of tech, but the potential for misuse is immense. To mock their user reviews... > “Graylark helped me find the person I'm stalking in under 20 minutes. This tool is unbelievable — a true game-changer for those with restraining orders like me who just want to get back at them for that court order."
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- downrightmike 10mo agoIt will never not be misused. These types of apps should be illegal
- readthenotes1 10mo agoDo you think criminalizing an activity will stop criminals from highly lucrative criminal activity without going to North Korea levels of societal control?
- inanutshellus 10mo ago... therefore what, exactly?
- array_key_first 10mo agoI mean, yes, generally, for most things. This mentality is kind of dumb, no offense. We have a bunch of laws. You could just as easily use your argument to say murder should be legal, or rape, and certainly people have. Laws do, actually, work, for the most part. No they're not perfect, but they don't need to be.
- xp84 10mo agono, it's not, those things are illegal but cars and trains are not illegal even though you can use them to run over people. Knives, same thing. Alcohol is not illegal even though you can use them to get people too drunk to resist you. Criminalizing everything that could be used to do bad things is an extreme position. Instead of jumping right to "ban it" you should probably first have a discussion where you consider whether (A) that ban will make any difference to its availability to most people who are criminally-minded anyway and (B) whether it has positive benefits to the law-abiding.
- mellosouls 10mo agoMore from this company: Why America’s Heroes Deserve the Most Advanced AI our goal was to build technology to safeguard American freedom and prosperity... ...America deserves more. While Silicon Valley hype centers around LLMs, AGI, and SSI, our focus remains on visual intelligence—understanding the world we see with our eyes, what we call Visual Super Intelligence https://geospy.ai/blog/why-america-s-heroes-deserve-the-visual-super-intelligence https://geospy.ai/blog/why-america-s-heroes-deserve-the-visu...
- nancyminusone 10mo ago'Americas heros' deserve oversight. Services like this (Flock, etc.) should either be illegal or accessible to everyone.
- fusslo 10mo agoIt's kinda shocking to me how people are so willing to give tools to government agencies to track, spy, find, dox, and identify fellow citizens. I guess I grew up drinking the 'American culture is one of mistrust of government' cool-aide, rather than 'American government has deep pockets' fruit punch. I'm not sure if it's just an evolution of the times, or an actual erosion of principals (since when? 9/11?)
- kennethrc 10mo ago> I grew up drinking the 'American culture ...' > misspells "Kool-Aid"
- fusslo 10mo agoyou could afford the real stuff??
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo agoOh yeah.
- fedreg 10mo agocan we use this to finally prove the moon landing is a hoax!!!
- voidUpdate 10mo agoI mean comparisons already exist showing matching landmarks between apollo photos and topography from orbiting satellites
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago"Try our demo!" Okay then, thinks EB, mentally trying to decide which photos to try it with. "Look here's a picture of a place, and here's a pin on a map that shows you where it is!" Yeah, I can do that without AI.
- TACIXAT 10mo agoDid I completely miss the technical aspect of this blog? They list an improvement but no details on how they achieved it. It sounds like a trained embedding model and a vector search. All told though this just reads as boring product talk.
- zamadatix 10mo agoI don't think you missed anything, but I don't think it's intended to be a technical blog either.
- adinisom 10mo agoThe picture in the article shows what looks like keypoint matching (ie, SIFT, SURF, FAST) between the query picture and the database. This can give an exact location if a picture of the location exists in their database. They contrasted this with their prior technique which is more of an image classifier that can identify general location from image features. This approach does not require their database to contain a picture of the exact location.
- chris_engel 10mo agoUnless someone posts a photo of the stolen car with the numberplate still on, how would you identify YOUR car that way? Its not like cars are unique pieces. Same for bikes or anything else...
- kube-system 10mo agoYou don't have to precisely identify it, you only need to narrow it down to a high likelihood of being your vehicle. Then you can verify the VIN in person. It wouldn't be hard to narrow things down: Year/make/model/trim/color/region/timeliness will narrow down to a very small if not already unique subset of vehicles. And on top of that vehicles may often have unique stickers, accessories, or scratches which can further strengthen the case. Flock e.g. uses this data in their vehicle identification algo.
- conductr 10mo agoI have no photos of my vehicles to initiate a search this way. Am I an outlier and it’s normal for people to keep vehicle pictures handy?
- kube-system 10mo agoIf you had photos of your vehicle, presumably you'd know where you took it. The idea here is that you find a picture of your vehicle that the thief took, and use this to find the location of where the thief has your vehicle.
- jaredhallen 10mo agoThat seems like a pretty rare situation compared to any number of alternative use cases. Most of which are decidedly less wholesome.
- kube-system 10mo agoIt is literally the “real world example” from the article.
- searine 10mo agoThis entire demo is just a surveillance state dog-whistle. "It's used for car theft!" except the intended use is obviously target government buyers for tracking citizens.
- paganel 10mo agoNothing like an OSINT company like Bellingcat hasn't done before, it's just that in those cases it was done on citizens belonging to adversary countries. It was just a matter of time, I guess.
- nubg 10mo agoWhat?
- paganel 10mo agoSee how Bellingcat was "reverse" finding the identities of Russian citizens based on the cars they were owning. Too lazy to search for the exact links, this was around 2020-2021, something like that. Later edit: Something like this [1], from late 2020: "Russian Vehicle Registration Leak Reveals Additional GRU Hackers". There were also some other articles with Google StreetView screenshots and the like, I won't search for them because even finding this one reference means I'm not doing something better with my time right now. [1] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/10/22/russian-vehicle-registration-leak-reveals-additional-gru-hackers/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/10/22/russian-...
- KaiserPro 10mo agoOk so this looks like bullshit. First things first, its entirely possible to geolocate using just visual markers. A bunch of startups did it around 2018 (most got bought by facebook, ie mapillary) They work by extracting keypoints from pictures and building a massive point cloud of identifiable key points. But That picture they use with supposed keypoint matching is wrong. None of those keypoints are reliable feature descriptors. They all are on foliage, which changes depending on season and wind. Geolocating that picture accurately _automatically_ using features is next to impossible. Now, they might have a vibe based matcher which does some basic spatial comparison, but I'm not sure how reliable they are, especially given a large search radius. The other interesting question is, where did they get their data from? I'm pretty sure google spent a lot of time making it really difficult to train from street view (lord knows we've tried.) Edit the demo here: https://geospy.ai/ https://geospy.ai/ is much more what I recognise a bog standard VPS system does. Note that the user is matching buildings. Thats far more reliable way to do feature matching.
- MontyCarloHall 10mo ago>They all are on foliage, which changes depending on season and wind. Geolocating that picture accurately _automatically_ using features is next to impossible. Seems plausible enough to me. The trees are evergreens in a place that doesn't get snow, and the keypoints are mostly grounded on stable parts of the trees (trunks or thick branches), which barring gale-force winds probably don't fluctuate all that much. The part that gives me pause are the keypoints that map the hood of the car to the pavement, and the point on the far right that maps the ledge to the pavement. How can a system robust enough to map foliage also return such blatant false matches?
- KaiserPro 10mo ago> return such blatant false matches long answer, have a try on this demo: https://docs.opencv.org/4.x/dc/dc3/tutorial_py_matcher.html https://docs.opencv.org/4.x/dc/dc3/tutorial_py_matcher.html short answer is that they are similar enough features to match. think of them as homophones (ie words that sound the same but have different meanings) in language. You need context to be able to filter them out. (https://github.com/polygon-software/python-visual-odometry/blob/master/Chapter%2010%20-%20RANSAC%20%26%20Bundle%20Adjustment.ipynb https://github.com/polygon-software/python-visual-odometry/b...) > don't fluctuate all that much. Over time that doesn't bear out. Good features are areas of high contrast with nice clearly defined edges (text is great, so are buildings). branches move, which means they create lots of diffrent features depending on the wind, even light wind. when we were building out maps, we filtered as much greenery out as possible
- momojo 10mo agoReminds me of the Clearview AI controversy[0]. I'm not diminishing the ethics debate, but it's crazy to me how easy it was for two non-technical rich dudes in a garage to build Clearview AI (And before vibe-coding!): 1. scrape billions of faces from the internet 2. `git clone` any off the shelf facial-recognition repo It was just a matter of when. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI#History
- ngcc_hk 10mo agoConcerned but given the use can it be stopped ?
- motbus3 10mo agoYes. If one knows that someone has their identifiable data without consent it is a problem. While they are pictures on the internet it is one thing, when you gather them all and put a label with a number then it is problematic. Remember that FaceApp to make you older, younger etc? Imagine how much data those guys collected? I know someone who submitted the face of a member of my family without consent. You could not even complain without agreeing with the TOS first
- Aherontas 10mo agoUnfortunately we will see this kind of cases more and more with AI rise. I don't believe it is the only app that could do relevant labeled searching in faces etc.
- DrScientist 10mo agoAm I the only one that finds it amusing that conpanies like Google and Facebook sent Clearview legal letters complaining about scraping data from their sites?
- hhh 10mo agoLast time I looked at this company they just dumped your uploads into an unauthenticated gcp bucket. They just ran your photo thru an llm and asked for its location at the time, and the founder was doing something very weird (in my opinion) with scraping Tinder profiles. https://x.com/i/status/1786030866214326651 https://x.com/i/status/1786030866214326651
- leobg 10mo agoWhat were the jpgs in tge thotDBSmash folder? Did the founder use that bucket to collect photos of women? Or was that geolocation material, too…
- cameronh90 10mo ago> Or was that geolocation material, too… Yeah I think we've figured out what inspired him to build the tool. :/
- tonyhart7 10mo agoif creep and tech nerd was a person:
- hhh 10mo agoYou upload photos to tinder, and tinder has rough data on location provided (distance to you) i believe, the photos were the photos people posted on their tinder profile.
- Sophira 10mo agoBack when GeoSpy was available for everyone to use, I did a test where I just uploaded an image that had a black background and white text saying the location of a place and a textual description. GeoSpy told me that it was the place mentioned in the picture, with the textual description as evidence.
- hhh 10mo agoYes, I have done the same and also used it to prompt inject to give some info about the prompt, but I don’t have that data anymore.
- fassssst 10mo agoThieves will just ask their favorite chat bot to change the background of the photo.
- toephu2 10mo ago"law enforcement could quickly locate and recover the stolen vehicle" "law enforcement agencies can achieve faster resolutions, greater efficiency, and better outcomes for vehicle theft cases" Could and would are two very different things in America. In most cases, the police would simply do nothing. Facial recognition technology (see Facebook auto-detecting your friends when uploading a photo) has existed for decades. Why do the police still post photos of suspects asking the public in help identifying so-and-so?* Can't they cross-reference with the DMV database or even Facebook to see if there are any matches? *Although these days they even stopped doing that, I've seen cases where they blurred out the suspects face and then asked the public in help identifying them. They do this to protect the criminal's identity. Sigh. I wish we could bring back name and shame.
- ibejoeb 10mo ago"law enforcement could quickly locate and recover the stolen vehicle" geospy.ai: the real technology seems to be that they invented the world's thinnest veil
- Aachen 10mo agoClearview seems even worse to me, but yeah this is a good candidate for second place on the list of undesirable businesses
- ibejoeb 10mo agoHah. Good point. Allow me to counter: the name alone. Clearview could be eye drops. GeoSpy: well...
- ImPostingOnHN 10mo agoI think Flock beat them to it
- jojobas 10mo agoSo you can find the place where car thieves took it to take pictures, already knowing which city it was in from the ad. How useful is that!
- daniel_heinen 10mo agoFounder of GeoSpy here, Thanks for the post, AMA for anyone into computer vision or AI. :)
- kachapopopow 10mo agoArticles seem to only go back to around 2024, how about 1.0? What was major enough to finally reach 1.0? Would be great to have a more technical blog post about what kind of major breakthroughs were discovered while developing this since the first discovery of this in 2022.
- tonyhart7 10mo agohow much legal fund you prepare
- blks 10mo agoWhy do you have a folder called “thotDBSmash”? What were you collecting there and why?
- badfuture 10mo agoTrashFuture recently did a show on this company with the guy from Blood Work. Unfortunately it it's behind a paywall, but it's a great episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo0gualrJa4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo0gualrJa4 Go to 5:30 for a taste
- toss1 10mo agoNice idea. Maybe do it for bicycles which are often more unique/personalized. Also, how are they going to identify identical model/trim/color cars when the license plates have been removed or switched?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- motbus3 10mo agoEven if this was a real application, it is wrong
- mercora 10mo agoIf a thief is selling your stolen car, would that not be very easy to locate by showing interest in buying it? Am I missing something?
- potato3732842 10mo agoA lot of people lack the ability to do or credibly threaten sufficient violence for that to be actionable. Serving all the details up to the cops, who have nearly infinite ability to threaten violence, on a silver platter "here's your open and shut auto theft case, now go pad your stats" is the more tractable solution.
- mercora 10mo agothat is not that either though or is it? i mean say i found my vehicle on some platform for sale and then located it with their service, now what? i call the cops i suppose, i dont see how this is much different to calling them once they agreed to meet somewhere.
- LocalH 10mo agoFurther and further into hyper-surveillance hell