  Is it possible to build a system to determine the location where a photo was
taken using just its pixels? In general, the problem seems exceptionally
difficult: it is trivial to construct situations where no location can be
inferred. Yet images often contain informative cues such as landmarks, weather
patterns, vegetation, road markings, and architectural details, which in
combination may allow one to determine an approximate location and occasionally
an exact location. Websites such as GeoGuessr and View from your Window suggest
that humans are relatively good at integrating these cues to geolocate images,
especially en-masse. In computer vision, the photo geolocation problem is
usually approached using image retrieval methods. In contrast, we pose the
problem as one of classification by subdividing the surface of the earth into
thousands of multi-scale geographic cells, and train a deep network using
millions of geotagged images. While previous approaches only recognize
landmarks or perform approximate matching using global image descriptors, our
model is able to use and integrate multiple visible cues. We show that the
resulting model, called PlaNet, outperforms previous approaches and even
attains superhuman levels of accuracy in some cases. Moreover, we extend our
model to photo albums by combining it with a long short-term memory (LSTM)
architecture. By learning to exploit temporal coherence to geolocate uncertain
photos, we demonstrate that this model achieves a 50% performance improvement
over the single-image model.
