More directly, it builds on the way that Google has been extracting house numbers for Street View for the past few years. It took a lot of doing, though. Datasets made up of multiple versions of the same signs had to be pored over to make up for visual artifacts and blurring. The algorithms then pieced these images together to extract the names and data from them.

Google says that this has been used to improve the location data for around a third of addresses around the world. Perhaps even on the Skyfall island and in Middle Zealand. If you fancy using Google's dataset for yourself, the framework is available on GitHub.