Camera Pose Estimation Using Collaborative Databases and Single Building Image

Abstract

Cities are in constant change and city managers aim to keep an updated digital model of the city for city governance. There are a lot of images uploaded daily on image sharing platforms (as “Flickr”, “Twitter”, etc.). These images feature a rough localization and no orientation information. Nevertheless, they can help to populate an active collaborative database of street images usable to maintain a city 3D model, but their localization and orientation need to be known. Based on these images, we propose the Data Gathering system for image Pose Estimation (DGPE) that helps to find the pose (position and orientation) of the camera used to shoot them with better accuracy than the sole GPS localization that may be embedded in the image header. DGPE uses both visual and semantic information, existing in a single image processed by a fully automatic chain composed of three main layers: Data retrieval and preprocessing layer, Features extraction layer, Decision Making layer. In this article, we present the whole system details and compare its detection results with a state of the art method. Finally, we show the obtained localization, and often orientation results, combining both semantic and visual information processing on 47 images. Our multilayer system succeeds in 26% of our test cases in finding a better localization and orientation of the original photo. This is achieved by using only the image content and associated metadata. The use of semantic information found on social media such as comments, hash tags, etc. has doubled the success rate to 59%. It has reduced the search area and thus made the visual search more accurate.