Previous |
Next 'Nerd Girl' Group at Tufts U. Seeks to Challenge Stereotypes of Engineering |
June 16, 2008, 02:29 PM ET
New Software Can Tell Where a Photo Was Taken
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created software that helps identify where in the world a photo was taken.
The software matches a given photo against six million geo-tagged photos available on Flickr. (Many of the online photo-sharing service’s users elect to identify where in the world their photos were taken.) By finding similarly-composed shots on Flickr—such as those containing narrow streets or tall cathedrals—the software can figure out where an image was likely to have been taken.
In experiments, the software geo-located 16% of test images to within 200 kilometers of where each photo was snapped, and the biggest challenge is often distinguishing between similar visual arrangements found in different places. “The world is pretty self-similar,” said James H. Hays, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department who co-created the algorithm.
“It’s probably not close to competing with a human expert in terms of its forensic usefulness, but it could be an aid in deeper image understanding,” he said. “We’re trying to help a computer understand an image as well as a human can.”
The research will be presented next week at the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Comprehension.—Catherine Rampell
Categories: Research
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.