Location Recognition Over Large Time Lags

TL;DR

This paper explores the challenge of recognizing locations in ancient photographs by analyzing features and employing domain adaptation to improve accuracy over large time gaps.

Contribution

It introduces the novel task of location recognition over large time lags and provides an extensive analysis of features and domain adaptation techniques.

Findings

Certain features are more discriminative for large time lags.

Domain adaptation improves recognition accuracy.

Analysis guides future research in cultural heritage mapping.

Abstract

Would it be possible to automatically associate ancient pictures to modern ones and create fancy cultural heritage city maps? We introduce here the task of recognizing the location depicted in an old photo given modern annotated images collected from the Internet. We present an extensive analysis on different features, looking for the most discriminative and most robust to the image variability induced by large time lags. Moreover, we show that the described task benefits from domain adaptation.