Localization of points of interest from georeferenced and oriented photographs.

ABSTRACTThe geographic coordinates automatically assigned to photos by the built-in GPS devices of cameras register the location a photo was taken at, rather than the location of the main point of interest within the depicted scene. While scientific advances have been made in the efforts to accurately locate the actual positions of such points of interest, these resort to either crude clustering-based approaches or expensive content-based approaches in order to estimate their geographic coordinates. In this paper we propose a novel technique that incorporates the compass direction supplied by modern cameras, allowing us to compute the most probable locations of the point of interest by analyzing intersections between the lines of sight originating from the cameras focusing on the same scene. Since the accuracy of the digital devices that supply the geographic coordinates and the compass direction can vary, we take these imprecisions into account when estimating the location.