Beyond GPS

Abstract

Increasingly, geographic information is being associated with personal photos. Recent research results have shown that the additional global positioning system (GPS) information helps visual recognition for geotagged photos by providing location context. However, the current GPS data only identifies the camera location, leaving the viewing direction uncertain. To produce more precise location information, i.e. the viewing direction for geotagged photos, we utilize both Google Street View and Google Earth satellite images. Our proposed system is two-pronged: 1) visual matching between a user photo and any available street views in the vicinity determine the viewing direction, and 2) when only an overhead satellite view is available, near-orthogonal view matching between the user photo and satellite imagery computes the viewing direction. Experimental results have shown the promise of the proposed framework.