  The task of a visual landmark recognition system is to identify photographed
buildings or objects in query photos and to provide the user with relevant
information on them. With their increasing coverage of the world's landmark
buildings and objects, Internet photo collections are now being used as a
source for building such systems in a fully automatic fashion. This process
typically consists of three steps: clustering large amounts of images by the
objects they depict; determining object names from user-provided tags; and
building a robust, compact, and efficient recognition index. To this date,
however, there is little empirical information on how well current approaches
for those steps perform in a large-scale open-set mining and recognition task.
Furthermore, there is little empirical information on how recognition
performance varies for different types of landmark objects and where there is
still potential for improvement. With this paper, we intend to fill these gaps.
Using a dataset of 500k images from Paris, we analyze each component of the
landmark recognition pipeline in order to answer the following questions: How
many and what kinds of objects can be discovered automatically? How can we best
use the resulting image clusters to recognize the object in a query? How can
the object be efficiently represented in memory for recognition? How reliably
can semantic information be extracted? And finally: What are the limiting
factors in the resulting pipeline from query to semantics? We evaluate how
different choices of methods and parameters for the individual pipeline steps
affect overall system performance and examine their effects for different query
categories such as buildings, paintings or sculptures.
