CityGuessr: City-Level Video Geo-Localization on a Global Scale
This addresses the need for worldwide video geolocalization, which is incremental as it extends existing image-based methods to videos and expands beyond region-specific approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of video geolocalization at a global scale, which was previously unexplored, by introducing a new dataset (CityGuessr68k with 68,269 videos from 166 cities) and a transformer-based method with a Self-Cross Attention module and TextLabel Alignment, achieving performance demonstrated on their dataset and Mapillary (MSLS).
Video geolocalization is a crucial problem in current times. Given just a video, ascertaining where it was captured from can have a plethora of advantages. The problem of worldwide geolocalization has been tackled before, but only using the image modality. Its video counterpart remains relatively unexplored. Meanwhile, video geolocalization has also garnered some attention in the recent past, but the existing methods are all restricted to specific regions. This motivates us to explore the problem of video geolocalization at a global scale. Hence, we propose a novel problem of worldwide video geolocalization with the objective of hierarchically predicting the correct city, state/province, country, and continent, given a video. However, no large scale video datasets that have extensive worldwide coverage exist, to train models for solving this problem. To this end, we introduce a new dataset, CityGuessr68k comprising of 68,269 videos from 166 cities all over the world. We also propose a novel baseline approach to this problem, by designing a transformer-based architecture comprising of an elegant Self-Cross Attention module for incorporating scenes as well as a TextLabel Alignment strategy for distilling knowledge from textlabels in feature space. To further enhance our location prediction, we also utilize soft-scene labels. Finally we demonstrate the performance of our method on our new dataset as well as Mapillary(MSLS). Our code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ParthPK/CityGuessr