Audio Geolocation: A Natural Sounds Benchmark
This work addresses the challenge of audio-based localization for applications like ecology or multimedia analysis, but it is incremental as it adapts existing image geolocation techniques to audio.
The paper tackles the problem of determining geographic location from audio recordings by formalizing audio geolocation and benchmarking methods using wildlife sounds from the iNatSounds dataset, proposing an approach that integrates species range prediction with retrieval-based techniques and exploring multimodal cues with visual content.
Can we determine someone's geographic location purely from the sounds they hear? Are acoustic signals enough to localize within a country, state, or even city? We tackle the challenge of global-scale audio geolocation, formalize the problem, and conduct an in-depth analysis with wildlife audio from the iNatSounds dataset. Adopting a vision-inspired approach, we convert audio recordings to spectrograms and benchmark existing image geolocation techniques. We hypothesize that species vocalizations offer strong geolocation cues due to their defined geographic ranges and propose an approach that integrates species range prediction with retrieval-based geolocation. We further evaluate whether geolocation improves when analyzing species-rich recordings or when aggregating across spatiotemporal neighborhoods. Finally, we introduce case studies from movies to explore multimodal geolocation using both audio and visual content. Our work highlights the advantages of integrating audio and visual cues, and sets the stage for future research in audio geolocation.