Abstract The task of a visual landmark recognition system is to identify photographed buildings or objects in query photos and to provide the user with relevant information on them. With their increasing coverage of the world’s landmark buildings and objects, Internet photo collections are now being used as a source for building such systems in a fully automatic fashion. This process typically consists of three steps: clustering large amounts of images by the objects they depict; determining object names from user-provided tags; and building a robust, compact, and efficient recognition index. To this date, however, there is little empirical information on how well current approaches for those steps perform in a large-scale open-set mining and recognition task. Furthermore, there is little empirical information on how recognition performance varies for different types of landmark objects and where there is still potential for improvement. With this paper, we intend to fill these gaps. Using a dataset of 500 k images from Paris, we analyze each component of the landmark recognition pipeline in order to answer the following questions: How many and what kinds of objects can be discovered automatically? How can we best use the resulting image clusters to recognize the object in a query? How can the object be efficiently represented in memory for recognition? How reliably can semantic information be extracted? And finally: What are the limiting factors in the resulting pipeline from query to semantics? We evaluate how different choices of methods and parameters for the individual pipeline steps affect overall system performance and examine their effects for different query categories such as buildings, paintings or sculptures.
There is also work in that aims to eliminate redundancy in the dataset. In their hybrid 2D-3D pose estimation approach, Irschara al @cite_4 generate a set of synthetic views by projecting the SfM points onto a set of virtual cameras placed at regular intervals in the scene. They then decimate the set of synthetic views using a greedy set cover approach that finds a minimal subset of views such that each view in the subset has at least 150 3D points in common with an original view. Cao al @cite_33 use a similar criterion, but instead of views, they decimate the set of points in an SfM point cloud used for localization. Instead of set cover, they use a probabilistic variant of the K-Cover algorithm.
@cite_4 @cite_33
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Efficient view registration with respect to a given 3D reconstruction has many applications like inside-out tracking in indoor and outdoor environments, and geo-locating images from large photo collections. We present a fast location recognition technique based on structure from motion point clouds. Vocabulary tree-based indexing of features directly returns relevant fragments of 3D models instead of documents from the images database. Additionally, we propose a compressed 3D scene representation which improves recognition rates while simultaneously reducing the computation time and the memory consumption. The design of our method is based on algorithms that efficiently utilize modern graphics processing units to deliver real-time performance for view registration. We demonstrate the approach by matching hand-held outdoor videos to known 3D urban models, and by registering images from online photo collections to the corresponding landmarks. How much data do we need to describe a location? We explore this question in the context of 3D scene reconstructions created from running structure from motion on large Internet photo collections, where reconstructions can contain many millions of 3D points. We consider several methods for computing much more compact representations of such reconstructions for the task of location recognition, with the goal of maintaining good performance with very small models. In particular, we introduce a new method for computing compact models that takes into account both image-point relationships and feature distinctiveness, and we show that this method produces small models that yield better recognition performance than previous model reduction techniques.