Click4BuildingID@NTU: Click for Building Identification with GPS-enabled Camera Cell Phone

A working prototype of a building identification service which can be used on any camera cell phones equipped with GPS capability has been developed. Users can simply snap photos of architectures and send them, together with the corresponding GPS coordinates, via MMS to a remote server. The server will match the photos with the stored, GPS-tagged images using a combination of scale saliency algorithm for feature matching and earth movers distance measure for scene matching. The estimated location and other information are then sent back to the users via MMS. This prototype will have better accuracy than systems which rely solely on photo recognition given the exploitation of GPS information. Moreover, it is computationally lighter since the recognition engine only needs to compare stored images which lie within the GPS coordinates error range. It is relatively inexpensive as no special phones or subscriptions to telecommunication providers for provision of GPS equivalent location data (i.e.cell location) are needed.