Computer Scientists Scour Your Holiday Photos

Barence writes "Hundreds of thousands of images on Flickr are being used to teach a program to determine the geographic location of an image, simply by looking at it. The program attempts to mimic the way that humans can deduce the location of an image by searching for visual clues, such as similarities to pictures or locations they have seen previously. In its current state it can guess the location of a photo to within 200km, 16% of the time — extremely accurate given the complexity of the problem."

Comments

Like Sex Panther...

[dlaudel]

16% percent of the time it works every time.

Dude where's my photo

[stainlesssteelpat]

Dude, that's as accurate as my girlfriends map navigation. *sigh*

heh

[Kingrames]

Show it a picture of the andromeda galaxy and throw its statistics way off.

Re:heh

[somersault]

Nopes - it will guess "Starbucks", and there's always one within 200km, even in Andromeda.

Re:Within 200km, 16% of the time?

[Bearpaw]

Wait, don't tell me, let me guess where you're from ...

Obligatory - I can get it within 6378km 100%

[SlashTon]

of the time...

(Not counting those rich bastards who can afford taking a holiday on the ISS).

Automatic Carmen San diego

[goombah99]

Where's Goatse?

Re:Automatic Carmen San diego

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's Goatse? It used to be somewhere the sun didn't shine, but now apparently does.

Re:Automatic Carmen San diego

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's Goatse? Uranus?

Statistics is important

[UnknowingFool]

Just like all statistics getting a good sample population is very important. If this program were to sample the /. population, it would come to one of two conclusions.

1. We have no holidays as we don't socialize.
2. We all live within 1.0 km of a basement. :P

Re:Statistics is important

[stainlesssteelpat]

Just like all statistics getting a good sample population is very important. If this program were to sample the /. population, it would come to one of two conclusions.

1. We have no holidays as we don't socialize.
2. We all live within 1.0 km of a basement. :P

But it couldn't sample the population here, on account of the tinfoil hats.

Re:Statistics is important

[raehl]

That was much funnier before I started working out of my basement.

Scientist make new discovery

[Anonymous Coward]

Machine is shown hundreds of thousands of holiday pictures from Flickr.

Scientists surprised to discover it is possible for a machine to loose will to live.

Source code

[RandoX]

It's a for loop that spits out "Your mom's basement".

Re:Source code

[Anonymous Coward]

And if I had mod points you'd lose 1 for being redundant/pointless. This isn't digg where what you think matters unless you have those mod points.

The irony...oh god, the FUCKING IRONY!

Just checked on flickr...

[stoofa]

OsamaBinLaden2001 has deleted his account

Re:Just checked on flickr...

[aadvancedGIR]

I don't think he has to worry, that program does not seem to be any better that GWB when it comes to determine the right country to attack.

Yes, I'm an idiot.

[SlashTon]

Yes, I meant through the Earth distance and yes I did manage to use the radius.

That will teach me to post before drinking my coffee...

Re:This is very hard

[cheebie]

Would you know simply by looking at the photos without the sign that this was not say the grand canyon?

Yes, because there aren't 746 helicopters flying over it.

Re:Where pictures are taken

[SteveAyre]

So it's actually less accurate than if it just guessed? :)

Re:Within 200km, 16% of the time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, don't tell me, let me guess where you're from ... Anyone from NYC calls it "the city", so obviously not from there. But the rest of the world is inconsequential anyway. For instance, LA is just the syllable between SO and TI.

Re:Where pictures are taken

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer Scientists Scour Your Holiday Photos

What they find:

• London
• France
• My underpants

Moon Landing pictures!

[erroneus]

I'd like to present this with Moon landing pictures to see where the moon landing was staged! (hahaha... love it)

Re:Where pictures are taken

[danaris]

No, I think you're misunderstanding how this works.

Given that there are 6 locations where all (or nearly all) of the pictures being used were taken,

Deriving from this that the probability of getting any 1 of these right by random guessing is 1 in 6,

Given that the accuracy averaged over 200 pictures is slightly less than 1 in 6,

The computer does slightly worse than chance.

However, my guess is that the first given is not entirely correct ;-)

Dan Aris

Re:Where pictures are taken

[Melfina]

It's like answering 'True' in a multiple choice test!

Re:Where pictures are taken

[Naughty Bob]

then... if there are 6 sources of pictures, by blindfold guessing you'll get it right 16.66..% of the time If they're smart, they'll only ever guess one of two points:

point a) Halfway between NY and Washington DC
point b) Halfway between London and Paris

This should give them a better than one-in-three chance of being correct to within 200km, as long as their program can take a decent stab at guessing which of the two sets is the more likely....