Automatic annotation of geo-information in panoramic street view by image retrieval

Panoramic street view is now becoming a popular service in digital map due to its expedient of virtual walking through. Recently, some geo-tagged photos have been added into street view as additional illustration images for the same scenes. However, these images come directly from certain photo sharing websites where users manually tag the locations of their uploaded images; the quality of annotated location is very poor. In this paper, we propose a system to annotate the location tags of users' images in panoramic street view only with visual features. By searching the exemplar region which mostly matches the query image, the system can annotate the query image with geo-information provided by the matched exemplar image. In order to boost matching performance, various techniques such as the motion estimation, visual clustering and feature matching are implemented in our system. The experiments show satisfactory performance and promising results.