Papers › Revisiting IM2GPS in the Deep Learning Era

Revisiting IM2GPS in the Deep Learning Era

13 May 2017ICCV 2017 10arXiv:1705.04838archive 2025-07-28

Nam Vo, Nathan Jacobs, James Hays

Image geolocalization, inferring the geographic location of an image, is a challenging computer vision problem with many potential applications. The recent state-of-the-art approach to this problem is a deep image classification approach in which the world is spatially divided into cells and a deep network is trained to predict the correct cell for a given image. We propose to combine this approach with the original Im2GPS approach in which a query image is matched against a database of geotagged images and the location is inferred from the retrieved set. We estimate the geographic location of a query image by applying kernel density estimation to the locations of its nearest neighbors in the reference database. Interestingly, we find that the best features for our retrieval task are derived from networks trained with classification loss even though we do not use a classification approach at test time. Training with classification loss outperforms several deep feature learning methods (e.g. Siamese networks with contrastive of triplet loss) more typical for retrieval applications. Our simple approach achieves state-of-the-art geolocalization accuracy while also requiring significantly less training data.

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Tasks

ClassificationDeep LearningDensity EstimationGeneral ClassificationImage ClassificationPhoto geolocation estimationRetrievalimage-classification

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS (... 28m database) City level (25 km) 33.3 #5 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS (... 28m database) Continent level (2500 km) 73.4 #5 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS (... 28m database) Country level (750 km) 61.6 #5 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS (... 28m database) Reference images 28M #5 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS (... 28m database) Region level (200 km) 47.7 #5 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS (... 28m database) Street level (1 km) 14.4 #5 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS (... 28m database) Training images 6M #5 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] KNN, sigma=4) City level (25 km) 33.3 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] KNN, sigma=4) Continent level (2500 km) 71.3 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] KNN, sigma=4) Country level (750 km) 57.4 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] KNN, sigma=4) Reference images 0 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] KNN, sigma=4) Region level (200 km) 44.3 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] KNN, sigma=4) Street level (1 km) 12.2 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] KNN, sigma=4) Training images 6M #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) City level (25 km) 21.9 #9 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) Continent level (2500 km) 63.7 #9 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) Country level (750 km) 49.4 #9 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) Reference images 0 #9 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) Region level (200 km) 34.6 #9 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) Street level (1 km) 6.8 #9 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) Training images 6M #9 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS (kNN, sigma = 4) City level (25 km) 19.4 #11 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS (kNN, sigma = 4) Continent level (2500 km) 55.9 #11 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS (kNN, sigma = 4) Country level (750 km) 38.9 #11 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS (kNN, sigma = 4) Region level (200 km) 26.9 #11 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS (kNN, sigma = 4) Street level (1 km) 7.2 #11 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS (kNN, sigma = 4) Training Images 6M #11 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) City level (25 km) 14.8 #12 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) Continent level (2500 km) 52.4 #12 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) Country level (750 km) 32.6 #12 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) Region level (200 km) 21.4 #12 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) Street level (1 km) 4.0 #12 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([L] 7011C) Training Images 6M #12 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([M] 7011C) City level (25 km) 14.2 #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([M] 7011C) Continent level (2500 km) 52.7 #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([M] 7011C) Country level (750 km) 33.5 #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([M] 7011C) Region level (200 km) 21.3 #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([M] 7011C) Street level (1 km) 3.7 #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation Im2GPS3k Im2GPS ([M] 7011C) Training Images 6M #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation YFCC4k [L]kNN, σ = 4 City (25 km) 5.7 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation YFCC4k [L]kNN, σ = 4 Continent (2500 km) 42.0 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation YFCC4k [L]kNN, σ = 4 Country (750 km) 23.5 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation YFCC4k [L]kNN, σ = 4 Region (200 km) 11.0 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Photo geolocation estimation YFCC4k [L]kNN, σ = 4 Street (1 km) 2.3 #4 of 4 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.

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