Why are some Street View panoramas blank?

The creation of the map2seq dataset relies on humans navigating in Street View. To make the results reproducible and allow other researcher to evaluate their systems on the same data, we use an offline dataset of Street View panoramas. Because that dataset is not publicly available, we are not allowed to use those images on this website. However, some of the panoramas in the offline dataset are still available on the official Street View API. In the table below you see the number of available and removed panoramas.

Updated	online	removed
October 2021	21024	8617
March 2021	16143	13498
January 2020	23350	6291

How was the map created?

The panoramas of above mentioned dataset are taken at different dates (see table below). To have a map that is aligned with the panoramas we extract the covered part of Manhattan from the planet.osm file of December 2017. The map tiles were rendered with mod_tile and a carto config that removes street and district names.

	2009	2011	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	unknown
Count	93	73	55	286	71	296	25745	3022