Multi-scale attention encoder for street-to-aerial image geo-localization

The goal of street-to-aerial cross-view image geo-localization is to determine the location of the query street-view image by retrieving the aerial-view image from the same place.The drastic viewpoint and appearance gap between the aerial-view and the street-view images brings a huge challenge against this task.In this paper,we propose a novel multiscale attention encoder to capture the multiscale contextual information of the aerial/street-view images.To bridge the domain gap between these two view images,we first use an inverse polar transform to make the street-view images approximately aligned with the aerial-view images.Then,the explored multiscale attention encoder is applied to convert the image into feature representation with the guidance of the learnt multiscale information.Finally,we propose a novel global mining strategy to enable the network to pay more attention to hard negative exemplars.Experiments on standard benchmark datasets show that our approach obtains 81.39%top-1 recall rate on the CVUSA dataset and 71.52%on the CVACT dataset,achieving the state-of-the-art performance and outperforming most of the existing methods significantly.

Agricultural Market Name Geo-Locating System Based on an Administrative Ontology and Web Search Engine

The problem of associating the agricultural market names on web sites with their locations is essential for geographical analysis of the agricultural products. In this paper, an algorithm which employs the administrative ontology and the statistics from the search results were proposed. The experiments with 100 market names collected from web sites were conducted. The experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm proposed obtains satisfactory performance in resolving the problem above, thus the effectiveness of the method is verified.

The Application of Information Systems to Improve Ambulance Response Times in the UK

Emergency ambulance services in the UK are tasked with providing pre-hospital patient care and clinical services with a target response time between call connect to on-scene attendance.In 2017,NHS England introduced four new response time categories based on patient needs.The most challenging is to be on-scene for a life-threatening situation within seven minutes of the call being connected when such calls are random in terms of time and place throughout a large territory.Recent evidence indicates emergency ambulance services regularly fall short of achieving the target ambulance response times set by the National Health Service(NHS).To achieve these targets,they need to undertake transformational change and apply statistical,operations research and artificial intelligence techniques in the form of five separate modules covering demand forecasting,plus locate,allocate,dispatch,monitoring and re-deployment of resources.These modules should be linked in real-time employing a data warehouse to minimise computational data and generate accurate,meaningful and timely decisions ensuring patients receive an appropriate and timely response.A simulation covering a limited geographical area,time and operational data concluded that this form of integration of the five modules provides accurate and timely data upon which to make decisions that effectively improve ambulance response times.

On the role of geometry in geo-localization

Consider the geo-localization task of finding the pose of a camera in a large 3 D scene from a single image.Most existing CNN-based methods use as input textured images.We aim to experimentally explore whether texture and correlation between nearby images are necessary in a CNN-based solution for the geo-localization task.To do so,we consider lean images,textureless projections of a simple 3 D model of a city.They only contain information related to the geometry of the scene viewed(edges,faces,and relative depth).The main contributions of this paper are:(i)to demonstrate the ability of CNNs to recover camera pose using lean images;and(ii)to provide insight into the role of geometry in the CNN learning process.

A news picture geo-localization pipeline based on deep learning and street view images

Numerous news or event pictures are taken and shared on the internet every day that have abundant information worth being mined,but only a small fraction of them are geotagged.The visual content of the news image hints at clues of the geographical location because they are usually taken at the site of the incident,which provides a prerequisite for geo-localization.This paper proposes an automated pipeline based on deep learning for the geo-localization of news pictures in a large-scale urban environment using geotagged street view images as a reference dataset.The approach obtains location information by constructing an attention-based feature extraction network.Then,the image features are aggregated,and the candidate street view image results are retrieved by the selective matching kernel function.Finally,the coordinates of the news images are estimated by the kernel density prediction method.The pipeline is tested in the news pictures in Hong Kong.In the comparison experiments,the proposed pipeline shows stable performance and generalizability in the large-scale urban environment.In addition,the performance analysis of components in the pipeline shows the ability to recognize localization features of partial areas in pictures and the effectiveness of the proposed solution in news picture geo-localization.