Mobile Landmark Search with 3D Models

Landmark search is crucial to improve the quality of travel experience. Smart phones make it possible to search landmarks anytime and anywhere. Most of the existing work computes image features on smart phones locally after taking a landmark image. Compared with sending original image to the remote server, sending computed features saves network bandwidth and consequently makes sending process fast. However, this scheme would be restricted by the limitations of phone battery power and computational ability. In this paper, we propose to send compressed (low resolution) images to remote server instead of computing image features locally for landmark recognition and search. To this end, a robust 3D model based method is proposed to recognize query images with corresponding landmarks. Using the proposed method, images with low resolution can be recognized accurately, even though images only contain a small part of the landmark or are taken under various conditions of lighting, zoom, occlusions and different viewpoints. In order to provide an attractive landmark search result, a 3D texture model is generated to respond to a landmark query. The proposed search approach, which opens up a new direction, starts from a 2D compressed image query input and ends with a 3D model search result.