Papers › GeoCLIP: Clip-Inspired Alignment between Locations and Images for Effective Worldwide...

GeoCLIP: Clip-Inspired Alignment between Locations and Images for Effective Worldwide Geo-localization

27 Sep 2023NeurIPS 2023 11arXiv:2309.16020archive 2025-07-28

Worldwide Geo-localization aims to pinpoint the precise location of images taken anywhere on Earth. This task has considerable challenges due to immense variation in geographic landscapes. The image-to-image retrieval-based approaches fail to solve this problem on a global scale as it is not feasible to construct a large gallery of images covering the entire world. Instead, existing approaches divide the globe into discrete geographic cells, transforming the problem into a classification task. However, their performance is limited by the predefined classes and often results in inaccurate localizations when an image's location significantly deviates from its class center. To overcome these limitations, we propose GeoCLIP, a novel CLIP-inspired Image-to-GPS retrieval approach that enforces alignment between the image and its corresponding GPS locations. GeoCLIP's location encoder models the Earth as a continuous function by employing positional encoding through random Fourier features and constructing a hierarchical representation that captures information at varying resolutions to yield a semantically rich high-dimensional feature suitable to use even beyond geo-localization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work employing GPS encoding for geo-localization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method via extensive experiments and ablations on benchmark datasets. We achieve competitive performance with just 20% of training data, highlighting its effectiveness even in limited-data settings. Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate geo-localization using a text query by leveraging CLIP backbone of our image encoder. The project webpage is available at: https://vicentevivan.github.io/GeoCLIP

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ImageEncoder VicenteVivan/geo-clip/geoclip/model/GeoCLIP.py official repository ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 0342fbed5f4dd6e2 · report
LocationEncoderCapsule VicenteVivan/geo-clip/geoclip/model/GeoCLIP.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 10336c7c42408bd3 · report
_extract_image_features VicenteVivan/geo-clip/geoclip/model/GeoCLIP.py official repository ran · honoured contract fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 193ffaf24c16bd61 · report
equal_earth_projection VicenteVivan/geo-clip/geoclip/model/GeoCLIP.py official repository ran · honoured contract fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 0420b6ffe30c1b1b · report
load_gps_data VicenteVivan/geo-clip/geoclip/model/GeoCLIP.py official repository ran · honoured contract MIT (permissive) · 59757f850bed5fc9 · report
GaussianEncoding VicenteVivan/geo-clip/geoclip/model/GeoCLIP.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 88bf24771293c9e0 · report
GeoCLIP VicenteVivan/geo-clip/geoclip/model/GeoCLIP.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 0db29c57e5099ec7 · report
LocationEncoder VicenteVivan/geo-clip/geoclip/model/GeoCLIP.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · ccb9f7466f37469c · report
GaussianEncoding ramanakshay/hierarchical-geoclip/geoclip/model/geoclip.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · ae05a9ade5fb928f · report
GeoCLIP ramanakshay/hierarchical-geoclip/geoclip/model/geoclip.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 7e8b0eadc545633d · report
ImageEncoder ramanakshay/hierarchical-geoclip/geoclip/model/geoclip.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 8f9ebe49ed62b249 · report
LocationEncoder ramanakshay/hierarchical-geoclip/geoclip/model/geoclip.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 80221b8324d17fd9 · report
LocationEncoderCapsule ramanakshay/hierarchical-geoclip/geoclip/model/geoclip.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 57f6ab5e0536c43d · report

Tasks

Contrastive LearningGPS EmbeddingsImage RetrievalPhoto geolocation estimationVisual Place Recognitiongeo-localization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
GPS Embeddings Geo-Tagged NUS-WIDE (GPS + Visual) GeoCLIP mAP 0.362 #1 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
GPS Embeddings Geo-Tagged NUS-WIDE (GPS Only) GeoCLIP mAP 0.249 #1 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation GWS15k GeoCLIP City level (25 km) 3.1 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation GWS15k GeoCLIP Continent level (2500 km) 74.1 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation GWS15k GeoCLIP Country level (750 km) 45.7 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation GWS15k GeoCLIP Region level (200 km) 16.9 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation GWS15k GeoCLIP Street level (1 km) 0.6 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k GeoCLIP City level (25 km) 34.5 #3 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k GeoCLIP Continent level (2500 km) 83.8 #3 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k GeoCLIP Country level (750 km) 69.7 #3 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k GeoCLIP Region level (200 km) 50.7 #3 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k GeoCLIP Street level (1 km) 14.1 #3 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k GeoCLIP Training Images 4.7M #3 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation YFCC26k GeoCLIP City level (25 km) 22.2 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation YFCC26k GeoCLIP Continent level (2500 km) 76.0 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation YFCC26k GeoCLIP Country level (750 km) 57.5 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation YFCC26k GeoCLIP Region level (200 km) 36.7 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation YFCC26k GeoCLIP Street level (1 km) 11.6 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation YFCC26k GeoCLIP Training Images 4.7M #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

CLIPGPS

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