What makes Paris look like Paris?

Given a large repository of geotagged imagery, we seek to automatically find visual elements, e. g. windows, balconies, and street signs, that are most distinctive for a certain geo-spatial area, for example the city of Paris. This is a tremendously difficult task as the visual features distinguishing architectural elements of different places can be very subtle. In addition, we face a hard search problem: given all possible patches in all images, which of them are both frequently occurring and geographically informative? To address these issues, we propose to use a discriminative clustering approach able to take into account the weak geographic supervision. We show that geographically representative image…

• OO
  Office of Naval Research

  Award: N000141010934N000141010766
• DO
  Division of Information and Intelligent Systems

  Award: IIS0905402