Is it possible to determine the location of a photo from just its pixels? While the general problem seems exceptionally difficult, photos often contain cues such as landmarks, weather patterns, vegetation, road markings, or architectural details, which in combination allow to infer where the photo was taken. Previously, this problem has been approached using image retrieval methods. In contrast, we pose the problem as one of classification by subdividing the surface of the earth into thousands of multi-scale geographic cells, and train a deep network using millions of geotagged images. We show that the resulting model, called PlaNet, outperforms previous approaches and even attains superhuman accuracy in some cases. Moreover, we extend our model to photo albums by combining it with a long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture. By learning to exploit temporal coherence to geolocate uncertain photos, this model achieves a 50 performance improvement over the single-image model.
In summary, most previous approaches to photo geolocation are restricted to urban areas which are densely covered by street view imagery and tourist photos. Exceptions are Im2GPS @cite_7 @cite_28 and @cite_38 @cite_23 @cite_24 , which make additional use of satellite imagery. Prior work has shown that CNNs are well-suited for scene classification @cite_11 and geographical attribute prediction @cite_27 , but to our knowledge ours is the first method that directly takes a classification approach to geolocation using CNNs.
@cite_38 @cite_7 @cite_28 @cite_24 @cite_27 @cite_23 @cite_11
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The recent availability of large amounts of geotagged imagery has inspired a number of data driven solutions to the image geolocalization problem. Existing approaches predict the location of a query image by matching it to a database of georeferenced photographs. While there are many geotagged images available on photo sharing and street view sites, most are clustered around landmarks and urban areas. The vast majority of the Earth's land area has no ground level reference photos available, which limits the applicability of all existing image geolocalization methods. On the other hand, there is no shortage of visual and geographic data that densely covers the Earth - we examine overhead imagery and land cover survey data - but the relationship between this data and ground level query photographs is complex. In this paper, we introduce a cross-view feature translation approach to greatly extend the reach of image geolocalization methods. We can often localize a query even if it has no corresponding ground level images in the database. A key idea is to learn the relationship between ground level appearance and overhead appearance and land cover attributes from sparsely available geotagged ground-level images. We perform experiments over a 1600 km2 region containing a variety of scenes and land cover types. For each query, our algorithm produces a probability density over the region of interest. In this chapter, we explore the task of global image geolocalization—estimating where on the Earth a photograph was captured. We examine variants of the “im2gps” algorithm using millions of “geotagged” Internet photographs as training data. We first discuss a simple to understand nearest-neighbor baseline. Next, we introduce a lazy-learning approach with more sophisticated features that doubles the performance of the original “im2gps” algorithm. Beyond quantifying geolocalization accuracy, we also analyze (a) how the nonuniform distribution of training data impacts the algorithm (b) how performance compares to baselines such as random guessing and land-cover recognition and (c) whether geolocalization is simply landmark or “instance level” recognition at a large scale. We also show that geolocation estimates can provide the basis for image understanding tasks such as population density estimation or land cover estimation. This work was originally described, in part, in “im2gps” [9] which was the first attempt at global geolocalization using Internet-derived training data. Estimating geographic information from an image is an excellent, difficult high-level computer vision problem whose time has come. The emergence of vast amounts of geographically-calibrated image data is a great reason for computer vision to start looking globally - on the scale of the entire planet! In this paper, we propose a simple algorithm for estimating a distribution over geographic locations from a single image using a purely data-driven scene matching approach. For this task, we leverage a dataset of over 6 million GPS-tagged images from the Internet. We represent the estimated image location as a probability distribution over the Earthpsilas surface. We quantitatively evaluate our approach in several geolocation tasks and demonstrate encouraging performance (up to 30 times better than chance). We show that geolocation estimates can provide the basis for numerous other image understanding tasks such as population density estimation, land cover estimation or urban rural classification. We propose to use deep convolutional neural networks to address the problem of cross-view image geolocalization, in which the geolocation of a ground-level query image is estimated by matching to georeferenced aerial images. We use state-of-the-art feature representations for ground-level images and introduce a cross-view training approach for learning a joint semantic feature representation for aerial images. We also propose a network architecture that fuses features extracted from aerial images at multiple spatial scales. To support training these networks, we introduce a massive database that contains pairs of aerial and ground-level images from across the United States. Our methods significantly out-perform the state of the art on two benchmark datasets. We also show, qualitatively, that the proposed feature representations are discriminative at both local and continental spatial scales. Geographic location is a powerful property for organizing large-scale photo collections, but only a small fraction of online photos are geo-tagged. Most work in automatically estimating geo-tags from image content is based on comparison against models of buildings or landmarks, or on matching to large reference collections of geotagged images. These approaches work well for frequently photographed places like major cities and tourist destinations, but fail for photos taken in sparsely photographed places where few reference photos exist. Here we consider how to recognize general geo-informative attributes of a photo, e.g. the elevation gradient, population density, demographics, etc. of where it was taken, instead of trying to estimate a precise geo-tag. We learn models for these attributes using a large (noisy) set of geo-tagged images from Flickr by training deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We evaluate on over a dozen attributes, showing that while automatically recognizing some attributes is very difficult, others can be automatically estimated with about the same accuracy as a human. The recent availability of geo-tagged images and rich geospatial data has inspired a number of algorithms for image based geolocalization. Most approaches predict the location of a query image by matching to ground-level images with known locations (e.g., street-view data). However, most of the Earth does not have ground-level reference photos available. Fortunately, more complete coverage is provided by oblique aerial or “bird's eye” imagery. In this work, we localize a ground-level query image by matching it to a reference database of aerial imagery. We use publicly available data to build a dataset of 78K aligned crossview image pairs. The primary challenge for this task is that traditional computer vision approaches cannot handle the wide baseline and appearance variation of these cross-view pairs. We use our dataset to learn a feature representation in which matching views are near one another and mismatched views are far apart. Our proposed approach, Where-CNN, is inspired by deep learning success in face verification and achieves significant improvements over traditional hand-crafted features and existing deep features learned from other large-scale databases. We show the effectiveness of Where-CNN in finding matches between street view and aerial view imagery and demonstrate the ability of our learned features to generalize to novel locations. Progress in scene understanding requires reasoning about the rich and diverse visual environments that make up our daily experience. To this end, we propose the Scene Understanding database, a nearly exhaustive collection of scenes categorized at the same level of specificity as human discourse. The database contains 908 distinct scene categories and 131,072 images. Given this data with both scene and object labels available, we perform in-depth analysis of co-occurrence statistics and the contextual relationship. To better understand this large scale taxonomy of scene categories, we perform two human experiments: we quantify human scene recognition accuracy, and we measure how typical each image is of its assigned scene category. Next, we perform computational experiments: scene recognition with global image features, indoor versus outdoor classification, and "scene detection," in which we relax the assumption that one image depicts only one scene category. Finally, we relate human experiments to machine performance and explore the relationship between human and machine recognition errors and the relationship between image "typicality" and machine recognition accuracy.