Google Unveils Neural Network with "Superhuman" Ability to Determine the Location of Almost Any Image

[Thomas the Tank Engine]

 

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Here’s a tricky task. Pick a photograph from the Web at random. Now try to work out where it was taken using only the image itself. If the image shows a famous building or landmark, such as the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls, the task is straightforward. But the job becomes significantly harder when the image lacks specific location cues or is taken indoors or shows a pet or food or some other detail.

 

Nevertheless, humans are surprisingly good at this task. To help, they bring to bear all kinds of knowledge about the world such as the type and language of signs on display, the types of vegetation, architectural styles, the direction of traffic, and so on. Humans spend a lifetime picking up these kinds of geolocation cues.

 

So it’s easy to think that machines would struggle with this task. And indeed, they have.

 

Today, that changes thanks to the work of Tobias Weyand, a computer vision specialist at Google, and a couple of pals. These guys have trained a deep-learning machine to work out the location of almost any photo using only the pixels it contains.

 

Their new machine significantly outperforms humans and can even use a clever trick to determine the location of indoor images and pictures of specific things such as pets, food, and so on that have no location cues.

 

Their approach is straightforward, at least in the world of machine learning. Weyand and co begin by dividing the world into a grid consisting of over 26,000 squares of varying size that depend on the number of images taken in that location.

 

So big cities, which are the subjects of many images, have a more fine-grained grid structure than more remote regions where photographs are less common. Indeed, the Google team ignored areas like oceans and the polar regions, where few photographs have been taken.

 

 

Next, the team created a database of geolocated images from the Web and used the location data to determine the grid square in which each image was taken. This data set is huge, consisting of 126 million images along with their accompanying Exif location data.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read the rest: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600889/google-unveils-neural-network-with-superhuman-ability-to-determine-the-location-of-almost/