'Oh Web Image, Where Art Thou?'

Web image search today is mostly keyword-based and explores the content surrounding the image. Searching for images related to a certain location quickly shows that Web images typically do not reveal their explicit relation to an actual geographic position. The geographic semantics of Web images are either not available at all or hidden somewhere within the the Web pages' content. Our spatial search engine crawls and identifies Web pages with a spatial relationship. Analysing location-related Web pages, we identify photographs based on contentbased image analysis as well as image context. Following the photograph classification, a location-relevance classification process evaluates image context and content against the previously identified address. The results of our experiments show that our approach is a viable method for Web image location assessment. Thus, a large number of potentially geographically-related Web images are unlocked for commercially relevant spatial Web image search.

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