Accurate sensing of scene geo-context via mobile visual localization

Image geo-tagging has drawn a great deal of attention in recent years. The geographic information associated with images can be used to promote potential applications such as location recognition or virtual navigation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for accurate mobile image geo-tagging in urban areas. The approach is able to provide a comprehensive set of geo-context information based on the current image, including the real location of the camera and the viewing angle, as well as the location of the captured scene. Moreover, the parsed building facades and their geometric structures can also be estimated. First, for the image to be geo-tagged, we perform partial duplicate image retrieval to filter crowd-sourced images capturing the same scene. We then employ the structure-from-motion technique to reconstruct a sparse 3D point cloud of the scene. Meanwhile, the geometric structure of the query image is analyzed to extract building facades. Finally, by combining the reconstructed 3D scene model and the extracted structure information, we can register the camera location and viewing direction to a real-world map. The captured building location and facade orientation are also aligned. The effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated by experiment results.