Event geo-localization and tracking from crowd-sourced video metadata

Abstract

We propose a novel technique for event geo-localization (i.e. 2-D location of the event on the surface of the earth) from the sensor metadata of crowd-sourced videos collected from smartphone devices. With the help of sensors available in the smartphone devices, such as digital compass and GPS receiver, we collect metadata information such as camera viewing direction and location along with the video. The event localization is then posed as a constrained optimization problem using available sensor metadata. Our results on the collected experimental data shows correct localization of events, which is particularly challenging for classical vision based methods because of the nature of the visual data. Since we only use sensor metadata in our approach, computational overhead is much less compared to what would be if video information is used. At the end, we illustrate the benefits of our work in analyzing the video data from multiple sources through geo-localization.