What Makes A City A City? New Visual System Identifies City Characteristics

August 18, 2012

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If you’ve been to cities and you’ve had enough, have you been to Paris, France? Paris is defined by a few magical characteristics – the street signs, the architecture, the street features – and a new system at Carnegie Mellon identifies cities based on their special traits.

The project describes a fairly complex algorithm that is able to find aspects from Google Street view.

The system currently works in multiple city using large samples of images from cities around the world. Using these, the system can identify where a random photo was taken with some degree of accuracy. Interestingly, the system can also be used on everyday objects, including “discovering stylistic elements in other weakly supervised settings, e.g. “What makes an Apple product?’”

You can download the study PDF here.

via VisualNews

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