We propose an image representation and matching approach that substantially improves visual-based location estimation for images. The main novelty of the approach, called distinctive visual element matching (DVEM), is its use of representations that are specific to the query image whose location is being predicted. These representations are based on visual element clouds, which robustly capture the connection between the query and visual evidence from candidate locations. We then maximize the influence of visual elements that are geo-distinctive because they do not occur in images taken at many other locations. We carry out experiments and analysis for both geo-constrained and geo-unconstrained location estimation cases using two large-scale, publicly-available datasets: the San Francisco Landmark dataset with @math million street-view images and the MediaEval '15 Placing Task dataset with @math million geo-tagged images from Flickr. We present examples that illustrate the highly-transparent mechanics of the approach, which are based on common sense observations about the visual patterns in image collections. Our results show that the proposed method delivers a considerable performance improvement compared to the state of the art.
The DVEM is suited for cases in which there is no finite set of locations to apply a classification approach. However, we point out here, that classification approaches have been proposed for geo-constrained content-based location estimation. @cite_28 modeled each geo-tagged image in the collection as a class, and learned a per-example linear SVM classifier for each of these classes with a calibration procedure that makes the classification scores comparable to each other. Due to high computational cost in both off-line learning and online querying phases, the experiment was conducted on a limited dataset of @math photos from Google Streetview taken in Pittsburgh, U.S., covering roughly an area of @math .
@cite_28
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Creation and selection of relevant features for machine learning applications (including image classification) is typically a process requiring significant involvement of domain knowledge. It is thus desirable to cover at least part of that process with semi-automated techniques capable of discovering and visualizing those geometric characteristics of images that are potentially relevant to the classification objective. In this work, we propose to utilize multi-scale singular value decomposition (MSVD) along with approximate nearest neighbors algorithm: both have been recently realized using the randomized approach, and can be efficiently run on large, high-dimensional datasets (sparse or dense). We apply this technique to create a multi-scale view of every point in a publicly available set of LIDAR data of riparian images, with classification objective being separating ground from vegetation. We perform “centralized MSVD” for every point and its neighborhood generated by an approximate nearest neighbor algorithm. After completion of this procedure, the original set of 3-dimensional data is augmented by 36 dimensions generated by MSVD (in three different scales), which is then processed using a novel discretization pre-processing method and the SVM classification algorithm with RBF kernel. The result is two times better that the one previously obtained (in terms of its classification error level). The generic nature of the MSVD mechanism and standard mechanisms used for classification (SVM) suggest a wider utility of the proposed approach for other problems as well. The aim of this work is to localize a query photograph by finding other images depicting the same place in a large geotagged image database. This is a challenging task due to changes in viewpoint, imaging conditions and the large size of the image database. The contribution of this work is two-fold. First, we cast the place recognition problem as a classification task and use the available geotags to train a classifier for each location in the database in a similar manner to per-exemplar SVMs in object recognition. Second, as only few positive training examples are available for each location, we propose a new approach to calibrate all the per-location SVM classifiers using only the negative examples. The calibration we propose relies on a significance measure essentially equivalent to the p-values classically used in statistical hypothesis testing. Experiments are performed on a database of 25,000 geotagged street view images of Pittsburgh and demonstrate improved place recognition accuracy of the proposed approach over the previous work. Agricultural management increasingly uses crop maps based on classification of remotely sensed data. However, classification errors can translate to errors in model outputs, for instance agricultural production monitoring (yield, water demand) or crop acreage calculation. Hence, knowledge on the spatial variability of the classier performance is important information for the user. But this is not provided by traditional assessments of accuracy, which are based on the confusion matrix. In this study, classification uncertainty was analyzed, based on the support vector machines (SVM) algorithm. SVM was applied to multi-spectral time series data of RapidEye from different agricultural landscapes and years. Entropy was calculated as a measure of classification uncertainty, based on the per-object class membership estimations from the SVM algorithm. Permuting all possible combinations of available images allowed investigating the impact of the image acquisition frequency and timing, respectively, on the classification uncertainty. Results show that multi-temporal datasets decrease classification uncertainty for different crops compared to single data sets, but there was no “one-image-combination-fits-all” solution. The number and acquisition timing of the images, for which a decrease in uncertainty could be realized, proved to be specific to a given landscape, and for each crop they differed across different landscapes. For some crops, an increase of uncertainty was observed when increasing the quantity of images, even if classification accuracy was improved. Random forest regression was employed to investigate the impact of different explanatory variables on the observed spatial pattern of classification uncertainty. It was strongly influenced by factors related with the agricultural management and training sample density. Lower uncertainties were revealed for fields close to rivers or irrigation canals. This study demonstrates that classification uncertainty estimates by the SVM algorithm provide a valuable addition to traditional accuracy assessments. This allows analyzing spatial variations of the classifier performance in maps and also differences in classification uncertainty within the growing season and between crop types, respectively. In this paper, we treat the problem of continuous pose estimation for object categories as a regression problem on the basis of only 2D training information. While regression is a natural framework for continuous problems, regression methods so far achieved inferior results with respect to 3D-based and 2D-based classification-and-refinement approaches. This may be attributed to their weakness to high intra-class variability as well as to noisy matching procedures and lack of geometrical constraints. We propose to apply regression to Fisher-encoded vectors computed from large cells by learning an array of Fisher regressors. Fisher encoding makes our algorithm flexible to variations in class appearance, while the array structure permits to indirectly introduce spatial context information in the approach. We formulate our problem as a MAP inference problem, where the likelihood function is composed of a generative term based on the prediction error generated by the ensemble of Fisher regressors as well as a discriminative term based on SVM classifiers. We test our algorithm on three publicly available datasets that envisage several difficulties, such as high intra-class variability, truncations, occlusions, and motion blur, obtaining state-of-the-art results.