Researchers from La Salle-URL develop a system that geolocates videos based on their audiovisual content

Thursday, 12 February 2015. Researchers from the La Salle-URL Media Technologies Research Group have developed a system to facilitate the geolocation of videos to know where they were recorded.

This work opens the door to many applications, to validate the actual location of a large number of videos that are posted on Internet, and can be especially useful for companies.

This new system could be used in cases of missing persons and crisis situations and to improve visual searches on the Internet, while affording the possibility to develop a large number of leisure and recreational uses.

The research team, consisting of Xavier Sevillano,Xavier Valero and Francesc Alías have designed a system that improves geolocation by incorporating audio, a parameter which until now had not been taken into account in work of this kind. They also used videos that had no type of text reference that could help to locate them geographically in the world.

The new system uses the visual set of video frames plus the audio. These parameters are merged and grouped, and a computer algorithm designed by the researchers is used to compare them with previously captured and geolocated videos from around the world in order to located them on the map (a database of nearly 10,000 geolocated sequences was used for the study”.

Geographical coordinates are provided to indicate where the video was most likely recorded. Researchers have managed to nearly quadruple the accuracy of geolocation over existing systems based on the same database: in 1% of cases at 1km; 3% within a radius of 10km; and 7.4% at 100km.

These results represent a breakthrough in studies of this specific area and the system could continue to be tested with a broader database in the future. The study was published in the journal Information Sciences.

More information:
Elisa Alvarez
Press and External Relations La Salle-URL
Tel. 932 902 386
ealvarez@salleurl.edu