Which Country Is This? Automatic Country Ranking of Street View Photos
This addresses the challenge of geographic localization for applications like mapping or tourism, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods without a major breakthrough.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically identifying the country from Google Street View images by developing Country Guesser, a system that uses computer vision, machine learning, and text retrieval to rank likely countries, achieving results through cross-modal supervision with pre-trained language models.
In this demonstration, we present Country Guesser, a live system that guesses the country that a photo is taken in. In particular, given a Google Street View image, our federated ranking model uses a combination of computer vision, machine learning and text retrieval methods to compute a ranking of likely countries of the location shown in a given image from Street View. Interestingly, using text-based features to probe large pre-trained language models can assist to provide cross-modal supervision. We are not aware of previous country guessing systems informed by visual and textual features.