46.1IRApr 28
GeoSearch: Augmenting Worldwide Geolocalization with Web-Scale Reverse Image Search and Image MatchingTung-Duong Le-Duc, Hoang-Quoc Nguyen-Son, Minh-Son Dao
Worldwide image geolocalization, which aims to predict the GPS coordinates of any image on Earth, remains challenging due to global visual diversity. Recent generative approaches based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) leverage candidates retrieved from fixed databases for reasoning, but often struggle with scenes that are absent from the reference set. In this work, we propose GeoSearch, an open-world geolocation framework that integrates web-scale reverse image search into the RAG pipeline. GeoSearch augments LMM prompts with database-retrieved coordinates and textual evidence extracted from web pages. To mitigate noise from irrelevant content, we introduce a two-layer filtering mechanism consisting of image matching, followed by confidence-based gating. Experiments on standard benchmarks Im2GPS3k and YFCC4k demonstrate the superiority of GeoSearch under leakage-aware evaluation. Our code and data are publicly available to support reproducibility.
4.5IRMay 15
MERVIN: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Event Retrieval in Vietnamese News VideosAnh-Tai Pham-Nguyen, Tung-Duong Le-Duc, Anh-Duy Le et al.
The growth of online video platforms drives the need for effective, semantically grounded event retrieval. We present MERVIN, a unified multimodal framework for Vietnamese news videos that integrates keyframes, transcripts, and video summaries. Transcript quality is enhanced via Gemini 1.5 Flash, reducing noise from accents, background sounds, and recognition errors. Visual features are extracted with Perception Encoder, while a Vietnamese language model produces textual embeddings; both are indexed in Milvus for efficient similarity-based retrieval. In addition, a React-based interface enables iterative query refinement across modalities, improving semantic alignment. Experimental results on Vietnamese news videos demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system, with MERVIN achieving 79 out of 88 points in AI Challenge HCMC 2025 qualification phase and successfully retrieved all results for every query in the final round.