Where was the Picture Taken: Image Localization in Route Panoramas Using Epipolar Geometry

Finding the location where a picture was taken is an important problem for a variety of applications including surveying, interactive traveling and homeland security among others. The task becomes intractable though when the area under investigation reaches city/town size. The amount of data (pictures/videos) required to visually map a city, comprehensively, can be exhaustive for most search algorithms. In this paper we propose a novel method to effectively tackle this problem. The area is visually mapped as route panoramas that provide a compact yet comprehensive representation of the buildings and landmarks in the area. Given a query image taken at an arbitrary location in the area, we show that we can accurately recover the location of the camera by finding it´s epipole in the route panorama of the scene. To this end we show that there exists a fundamental matrix between a route panorama and a perspective image of the same scene. The fundamental matrix is calculated using feature matches as correspondences between the query image and the route panorama