A System for Landscape Photograph Localization

We present a system which supports localization of landscape photographs. Localization of a photograph is to assign the camera parameters to the photograph. The parameters are the camera's position, direction, focus and film size to take the photograph. An application of the system is metadata generation for location oriented search systems. Target photographs for the system are landscape photographs such that terrain in the photographs is enough characteristic to specify the locations. We describes features of photographic objects and a search area to define a search problem. The system takes the problem definition and an initial solution set as its input, and improves the solutions by a specified algorithm. We can use a genetic algorithm and a local search algorithm as the algorithm. Key points to the system are what we can describe to define search problems, and how effectively the system searches good solutions. Two evaluation experiments under an ideal condition shows that its expressiveness is enough and the system can find appropriate solutions effectively.