Advances in Image and Video Technology

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to exploit geotags as additional information for visual recognition of consumer photos to improve its performance. Geotags, which represent places where the photos were taken, for photos can be obtained automatically by carrying a portable small GPS device with digital cameras. Geotags have potential to improve performance of visual image recognition, since recognition targets are unevenly distributed. For example, “beach” photos can be taken near the sea and “lion” photos can be taken only in a zoo except Africa. To integrate geotag information into visual image recognition, we adopt two types of geographical information, raw values of latitude and longitude, and visual feature of aerial photos around the location the geotag represents. As classifiers, we use both a discriminative method and a generative method in the experiments. The objective of this paper is to examine if geotags can help category-level image recognition. Note that we define an image recognition problem as deciding if an image is associated with a certain given concept such as “mountain” and “beach” in this paper. We propose a novel method to carry out geotagged image recognition in this paper. The experimental results demonstrate effectiveness of usage of geographical information for recognition of consumer photos.