Classification of Urban Scenes from Geo-referenced Images in Urban Street-View Context

This paper addresses the challenging problem of scene classification in street-view georeferenced images of urban environments. More precisely, the goal of this task is semantic image classification, consisting in predicting in a given image, the presence or absence of a pre-defined class (e.g. shops, vegetation, etc.). The approach is based on the BOSSA representation, which enriches the Bag of Words (BoW) model, in conjunction with the Spatial Pyramid Matching scheme and kernel-based machine learning techniques. The proposed method handles problems that arise in large scale urban environments due to acquisition conditions (static and dynamic objects/pedestrians) combined with the continuous acquisition of data along the vehicle´s direction, the varying light conditions and strong occlusions (due to the presence of trees, traffic signs, cars, etc.) giving rise to high intra-class variability. Experiments were conducted on a large dataset of high resolution images collected from two main avenues from the 12th district in Paris and the approach shows promising results.