Networks of Landmarks, Photos, and People

Abstract: Social photo-sharing sites like Flickr contain vast amounts of latent information about the world and human behavior. We describe our recent work in building automatic algorithms that analyze large collections of imagery in order to extract some of this information. At a global scale, we show how geo-tagged photographs can be used to identify the most photographed places on Earth, as well as to infer the names and visual representations of these places. At a local scale, we show that we can build detailed 3-d models of a scene by combining information from thousands of 2-d photographs taken by different people and from different vantage points.