Semantic understanding of geotagged pictures

Semantic understanding based only on vision cues has been a challenging problem. This problem is particularly acute when the application domain is unconstrained photos available on the Internet or in personal repositories. In recent years, it has been shown that metadata captured with pictures can provide valuable contextual cues that complement the image content and can be used to improve classification performance. With the recent geotagging phenomenon, an important piece of metadata available with many pictures is GPS information. In this talk, I will describe recent research in the area of mining geographic information for boosting semantic understanding. I will discuss the association of image content, tags, and location metadata with image semantics within a contextual inference framework. With integrated GPS-capable cameras on the horizon and geotagging on the rise, this line of research will revolutionize event recognition and media annotation.