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

Where pictures are taken

[tomalpha]

The paper referenced in the article has an interesting density map of where their 20 million source photos were taken (ok, so they only ended up using 200 or so of these). It says it uses a logarithmic scale, and seems to imply that the vast majority of photos available to them on Flickr were taken in one of only a handful of locations:

• London
• Paris
• New York
• Washington
• Los Angeles
• Tokyo

Ok so there are a couple more than this, and my geography is appalling, but these seem to be the only areas that are are coloured red.

Photosynth looks cooler

[Bombula]

The Photosynth multi-resolution and image-recognition tech demonstrated at TED looked cooler if you ask me:

metacafe link here and TED link here.

Re:Random pick is correct ~8% of the time

[Anonymous Coward]

Re-check your math that is wrong.
Should be .08%