ViewFocus: Explore places of interests on Google maps using photos with view direction filtering

Abstract

This paper presents a novel system to explore places of interests based on the large amount of photos that are placed on Google Maps. The system, named ViewFocus, estimates the view directions of photos via robust object matching and camera reconstruction techniques, and geo-registers the directions on the map. Thus users are able to select the places they are interested in, and the system automatically returns a set of precise photos of the target places for users to focus their exploration, by filtering out photos that are pointing to other directions.