The appearance of the world varies dramatically not only from place to place but also from hour to hour and month to month. Every day billions of images capture this complex relationship, many of which are associated with precise time and location metadata. We propose to use these images to construct a global-scale, dynamic map of visual appearance attributes. Such a map enables fine-grained understanding of the expected appearance at any geographic location and time. Our approach integrates dense overhead imagery with location and time metadata into a general framework capable of mapping a wide variety of visual attributes. A key feature of our approach is that it requires no manual data annotation. We demonstrate how this approach can support various applications, including image-driven mapping, image geolocalization, and metadata verification.
2 PAPERS • 1 BENCHMARK
The standard evaluation protocol of Cross-View Time dataset allows for certain cameras to be shared between training and testing sets. This protocol can emulate scenarios in which we need to verify the authenticity of images from a particular set of devices and locations. Considering the ubiquity of surveillance systems (CCTV) nowadays, this is a common scenario, especially for big cities and high visibility events (e.g., protests, musical concerts, terrorist attempts, sports events). In such cases, we can leverage the availability of historical photographs of that device and collect additional images from previous days, months, and years. This would allow the model to better capture the particularities of how time influences the appearance of that specific place, probably leading to a better verification accuracy. However, there might be cases in which data is originated from heterogeneous sources, such as social media. In this sense, it is essential that models are optimized on camer
1 PAPER • 1 BENCHMARK