AutoLabel: labeling places from pictures and websites

Abstract

Most location based services require semantic place names such as Staples, rather than physical coordinates. Past work has mostly focussed on achieving localization accuracy, while assuming that the translation of physical coordinates to semantic names will be done manually. This paper makes an effort to automate this step, by leveraging the presence of a website corresponding to each store and the availability of a repository of WiFi-tagged pictures from different stores. By correlating the text inside the pictures, against the text extracted from store websites, our proposed system, called AutoLabel, can automatically label clusters of pictures, and the corresponding WiFi APs, with store names. Later, when a user enters a store, her mobile device scans the WiFi APs and consults a lookup table to recognize the store she is in. Experiment results from 40 different stores show recognition accuracy upwards of 87%, even with as few as 10 pictures from a store, offering hope that automatic large-scale semantic labeling may indeed be possible from pictures and websites of stores.