Where was the Picture Taken: Image Localization in Route Panoramas Using Epipolar Geometry

Finding the location where a picture was taken is an important problem for a variety of applications including surveying, interactive traveling and homeland security among others. The task becomes intractable though when the area under investigation reaches city/town size. The amount of data (pictures/videos) required to visually map a city, comprehensively, can be exhaustive for most search algorithms. In this paper we propose a novel method to effectively tackle this problem. The area is visually mapped as route panoramas that provide a compact yet comprehensive representation of the buildings and landmarks in the area. Given a query image taken at an arbitrary location in the area, we show that we can accurately recover the location of the camera by finding it’s epipole in the route panorama of the scene. To this end we show that there exists a fundamental matrix between a route panorama and a perspective image of the same scene. The fundamental matrix is calculated using featur...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICMCS
• Authors: Saad M. Khan, Fahd Rafi, Mubarak Shah
• Keywords: ICMCS 2006, Query Image, Reaches City/town Size, Route Panorama