GPS Estimation for Places of Interest From Social Users´ Uploaded Photos

Social media has become a very popular way for people to share their photos with friends. Because most of the social images are attached with GPS (geo-tags), a photo´s GPS information can be estimated with the help of the large geo-tagged image set while using a visual searching based approach. This paper proposes an unsupervised image GPS location estimation approach with hierarchical global feature clustering and local feature refinement. It consists of two parts: an offline system and an online system. In the offline system, a hierarchical structure is constructed for a large-scale offline social image set with GPS information. Representative images are selected for each GPS location refined cluster, and an inverted file structure is proposed. In the online system, when given an input image, its GPS information can be estimated by hierarchical global clusters selection and local feature refinement in the online system. Both the computational cost and GPS estimation performance demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical structure and inverted file structure in our approach.