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Computer Scientists Scour Your Holiday Photos

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the fanny-pack-detected dept.

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."

15 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Dude where's my photo by stainlesssteelpat · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
  2. heh by Kingrames · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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    If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
    1. Re:heh by somersault · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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      which is totally what she said
  3. Obligatory - I can get it within 6378km 100% by SlashTon · · Score: 5, Funny

    of the time...

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

  4. Automatic Carmen San diego by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Where's Goatse?

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:Automatic Carmen San diego by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Where's Goatse? Uranus?
  5. Statistics is important by UnknowingFool · · Score: 4, Funny
    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
    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  6. Scientist make new discovery by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny
    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.

  7. Source code by RandoX · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  8. Just checked on flickr... by stoofa · · Score: 4, Funny

    OsamaBinLaden2001 has deleted his account

    1. Re:Just checked on flickr... by aadvancedGIR · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

  9. Re:This is very hard by cheebie · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  10. Re:Where pictures are taken by SteveAyre · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  11. Moon Landing pictures! by erroneus · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  12. Re:Where pictures are taken by Melfina · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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    :3 rawr.