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What Makes Paris Look Like Paris

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posted on 2012-07-01, 00:00 authored by Carl Doersch, Saurabh Singh, Abhinav GuptaAbhinav Gupta, Josef Sivic, Alexei Efros

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 elements can be discovered automatically from Google Street View imagery in a discriminative manner. We demonstrate that these elements are visually interpretable and perceptually geo-informative. The discovered visual elements can also support a variety of computational geography tasks, such as mapping architectural correspondences and influences within and across cities, finding representative elements at different geo-spatial scales, and geographically-informed image retrieval.

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© ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. The definitive version is http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2185520.2185597

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2012-07-01

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