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

Re:Where pictures are taken

[elguillelmo]

then... if there are 6 sources of pictures, by blindfold guessing you'll get it right 16.66..% of the time

Automatic image recognition is no walk in the park

[hedu]

Reminds me of the experiment done in a Dutch military lab a couple of years ago. They trained a neural network to recognize whether a photograph taken out on a country road had a military vehicle in it or not.

The system recognized the photos from the training set perfectly, but did no better than random on images fed to it that were taken at different times.

Turns out all the training shots with a military vehicle in it had been taken on a sunny day, and the control shots without one had been taken when it was overcast. The system had been trained to recognize a different thing from what they intended!