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."

Where pictures are taken

The paper [cmu.edu] 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.

Re:Where pictures are taken

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

Re:Where pictures are taken

So it's actually less accurate than if it just guessed? :)

Actually, he kinda understands....

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%.

Re:Where pictures are taken

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%.

Re:Where pictures are taken

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.

Dude where's my photo

Dude, that's as accurate as my girlfriends map navigation. *sigh*

Within 200km, 16% of the time?

I'll guess...New York City, without even looking at the pictures that should get me in that ballpark.

What I need

... is a program that will remember the names of the people in the photos.

heh

Show it a picture of the andromeda galaxy and throw its statistics way off.

Re:heh

Nopes - it will guess "Starbucks", and there's always one within 200km, even in Andromeda.

Obligatory - I can get it within 6378km 100%

of the time...

(Not counting those rich bastards who can afford taking a holiday on the ISS).

Statistics is important

Just like all statistics getting a good sample population is very important. If this program were to sample the /. population, it would come to one of two conclusions.

1. We have no holidays as we don't socialize.
2. We all live within 1.0 km of a basement. :P

Photosynth looks cooler

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

metacafe link here [metacafe.com] and TED link here [ted.com].

Scientist make new discovery

Machine is shown hundreds of thousands of holiday pictures from Flickr.

Scientists surprised to discover it is possible for a machine to loose will to live.

Source code

It's a for loop that spits out "Your mom's basement".

This is very hard

Look at this set of pictures:

http://htmlhelp.com/~liam/Hawaii/Kauai/WaimeaCanyon/ [htmlhelp.com]

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.

Re:This is very hard

Would you know simply by looking at the photos without the sign that this was not say the grand canyon?

Yes, because there aren't 746 helicopters flying over it.

Just checked on flickr...

OsamaBinLaden2001 has deleted his account

Re:Just checked on flickr...

I don't think he has to worry, that program does not seem to be any better that GWB when it comes to determine the right country to attack.

Missing double blind

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.

Re:Missing double blind

It's a bit worse than that I think. Trying to identify location of a picture by looking at it in the way that humans do requires that you know the location. As an example of why this implies intimate knowledge to be useful, everyone knows of the big statue of liberty. Not just anyone can guess that your holiday picture with the non-descript base in the background was taken at the base of the statue of liberty. The same goes for > 90% of other places in the world.

Another example: The forests on planets on the show Stargate One, are they in Missouri, Montanna, Canada? Just looking at them will not necessarily tell you anything unless you are intimately familiar with the actual location.

A photo in Syntagma Square in Athens may look like it was taken in Central Park in NYC if not enough of the background was included. It will take huge amounts of data and photos to get anywhere close to what a human can do at this job, and even then it is limited to only what it has seen before.

Other knowledge plays a part too. London bridge is now in Arizona (I think) as it was moved brick by brick and re-assembled. Seeing the bridge does not now mean you know where it is .... it's a trick question. The point is that you need additional information as well. A picture that is a beautiful park setting that has a kangaroo in it? is it in Australia, or a zoo? Additional information is required.

Hats off to them for working on it. It's a tough problem.

Moon Landing pictures!

I'd like to present this with Moon landing pictures to see where the moon landing was staged! (hahaha... love it)

Automatic Carmen San diego

Where's Goatse?

Re:Automatic Carmen San diego

Where's Goatse?

Uranus?