  With the widespread availability of cellphones and cameras that have GPS
capabilities, it is common for images being uploaded to the Internet today to
have GPS coordinates associated with them. In addition to research that tries
to predict GPS coordinates from visual features, this also opens up the door to
problems that are conditioned on the availability of GPS coordinates. In this
work, we tackle the problem of performing image classification with location
context, in which we are given the GPS coordinates for images in both the train
and test phases. We explore different ways of encoding and extracting features
from the GPS coordinates, and show how to naturally incorporate these features
into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), the current state-of-the-art for
most image classification and recognition problems. We also show how it is
possible to simultaneously learn the optimal pooling radii for a subset of our
features within the CNN framework. To evaluate our model and to help promote
research in this area, we identify a set of location-sensitive concepts and
annotate a subset of the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100M dataset that has
GPS coordinates with these concepts, which we make publicly available. By
leveraging location context, we are able to achieve almost a 7% gain in mean
average precision.
