Constructing a landmark identification system for Geo-tagged photographs based on Web data analysis

In this research, we propose a method to automatically generate a landmark identification system for geo-tagged photographs, based on analysis of various data collected from the Web. The method first conducts Web analysis based on three major procedures: (1) Automatic extraction of points-of-interest (POIs) based on geographical clustering of geo-tagged images, (2) Retrieval of landmark candidates for each extracted POI from search results of map search API, and (3) Collection and feature extraction of Web images of the landmark candidates. The system then identifies the landmark which appears in the query geo-tagged photograph, by comparing the location and content-based features of the query with the information accumulated by the previous procedures. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable to construct a highly accurate landmark identification system by leveraging Web information.