Constructing Geospatial Concept Graphs from Tagged Images for Geo-Aware Fine-Grained Image Recognition

Abstract

While visual appearances play a main role in recognizing the concepts captured in images, additional information can provide complementary information for fine-grained image recognition, where concepts with similar visual appearances such as species of birds need to be distinguished. Especially for recognizing geospatial concepts, which are observed only at specific places, geographical locations of the images can improve the recognition accuracy. However, such geo-aware fine-grained image recognition requires prior information about the visual and geospatial features of each concept or the training data composed of high-quality images for each concept associated with correct geographical locations. By using a large number of images photographed in various places and described with textual tags which can be collected from image sharing services such as Flickr, this paper proposes a method for constructing a geospatial concept graph which contains the necessary prior information for realizing the geo-aware fine-grained image recognition, such as a set of visually recognizable fine-grained geospatial concepts, their visual and geospatial features, and the coarse-grained representative visual concepts whose visual features can be transferred to several fine-grained geospatial concepts. Leveraging the information from the images captured by many people can automatically extract diverse types of geospatial concepts with proper features for realizing efficient and effective geo-aware fine-grained image recognition.

Keywords

• tagged images
• concept graphs
• geospatial concepts
• visual concepts
• fine-grained image recognition
• geo-aware image recognition