Placing Photos with a Multimodal Probability Density Function

Abstract

Knowing the location where a photograph was taken provides us with data that could be useful in a wide spectrum of applications. With the advance of digital cameras, and with many users exchanging their digital cameras for GPS-enabled mobile phones, photographs annotated with geographical locations are becoming ever more present on photo-sharing websites such as Flickr. However there is still a mass of content that is not geotagged, meaning that algorithms for efficient and accurate geographical estimation of an image are needed. This paper presents a general model for effectively using both textual metadata and visual features of photos to automatically place them on a world map with state-of-the-art performance. In addition, we explore how information from user-modelling can be fused with our model, and investigate the effect such modelling has on performance.