Slashdot Mirror
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."
Look at this set of pictures:
http://htmlhelp.com/~liam/Hawaii/Kauai/WaimeaCanyon/
Would you know simply by looking at the photos without the sign that this was not say the grand canyon? The whole correct to 200 km aspect is troublesome when the state of the art in computer vision cannot yet even answer that this is a picture of a canyon.
From the looks of the test selecting London all the time would have a
1/6 chance = 16.67% chance.
They need better double blind testing and a more diverse set of geographical locations.
The dice analogy is right-on.
The problem is he just doesn't seem to realize that the chances of throwing doubles are 16.66%.
paintball
Actually, the earth is pretty big - you'd have only a 0.0246% of being within 200km of someone, counting water. Get rid of water and you get to around 0.075%.
paintball
That's if you choose points at random. If you only choose points corresponding to cities with large populations that frequently use internet photo-sharing sites, then your chances of being within 200km of the location become much better.