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Image Based Geo-localization in the Alps

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Abstract

Given a picture taken somewhere in the world, automatic geo-localization of such an image is an extremely useful task especially for historical and forensic sciences, documentation purposes, organization of the world’s photographs and intelligence applications. While tremendous progress has been made over the last years in visual location recognition within a single city, localization in natural environments is much more difficult, since vegetation, illumination, seasonal changes make appearance-only approaches impractical. In this work, we target mountainous terrain and use digital elevation models to extract representations for fast visual database lookup. We propose an automated approach for very large scale visual localization that can efficiently exploit visual information (contours) and geometric constraints (consistent orientation) at the same time. We validate the system at the scale of Switzerland (40,000 \(\hbox {km}^2\)) using over 1000 landscape query images with ground truth GPS position.

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Notes

  1. http://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/internet/swisstopo/en/home.

  2. http://openscenegraph.org.

  3. Synthetic experiments verified that taking the photo from ten or fifty meters above the ground does not degrade recognition besides very special cases like standing very close to a small wall.

  4. http://cvg.ethz.ch/research/mountain-localization.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported through SNF Grant 127224 by the Swiss National Science Foundation. We also thank Simon Wenner for his help to render the DEMs and Hiroto Nagayoshi for providing the CH2 dataset. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for useful discussions and constructive feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Vision and Geometry Group, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Olivier Saurer, L’ubor Ladický & Marc Pollefeys

  2. Google Inc., Zurich, Switzerland

    Georges Baatz

  3. GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Kiel, Germany

    Kevin Köser

Authors
  1. Olivier Saurer
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  2. Georges Baatz
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  3. Kevin Köser
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  4. L’ubor Ladický
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  5. Marc Pollefeys
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Olivier Saurer.

Additional information

Communicated by Edmond Boyer.

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Saurer, O., Baatz, G., Köser, K. et al. Image Based Geo-localization in the Alps. Int J Comput Vis 116, 213–225 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-015-0830-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-015-0830-0

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