Case Study: City of Detroit achieves first comprehensive citywide digital map and automated street-asset detection with Mapillary

City of Detroit - Customer Case Study

The City of Detroit faced the challenge of creating the first comprehensive digital map of Michigan’s largest city to connect resident reports to a master address dataset across more than 30 city departments. After initially paying an independent contractor for licensed street‑level imagery, the city turned to Mapillary and its street‑level imagery platform (plus automated feature extraction) to gain open, centralized access to up‑to‑date visual data.

Mapillary supported a pilot and a scaled survey using GoPro and Trimble MX2 360° cameras, resulting in 1,480,000 images uploaded to the Mapillary platform and more than half of Detroit’s 2,900+ miles of roads now live. The City of Detroit owns the images, Mapillary’s automated detection surfaces assets like fire hydrants, signs and crosswalks for use in the city’s GIS, and the public can view imagery to report issues—streamlining operations and moving the city toward full map coverage.

City of Detroit

Dexter Slusarski

City GIS Lead