Accurate Location Identification by Landmark Recognition

As one of the most interesting scenes, landmarks constitute a large percentage of the vast amount of scene images available on the web. On the other hand, a specific "landmark" usually has some characteristics that distinguish it from surrounding scenes and other landmarks. These two observations make the task of accurately estimating geographic information from a landmark image necessary and feasible. In this paper, we propose a method to identify landmark location by means of landmark recognition in view of significant viewpoint, illumination and temporal variations. We use GPS-based clustering to form groups for different landmarks in the image dataset. The images in each group rather fully express the possible views of the corresponding landmark. We then use a combination of edge and color histogram to match query to database images. Initial experiments with Zubud database and our collected landmark images show that is feasible.