Computer based location identification using images

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9020529-B2
Application number	US-201313936341-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Jul 8, 2013
Priority date	Mar 26, 2009
Publication date	Apr 28, 2015
Grant date	Apr 28, 2015

Abstract

In the field of mobile computing, a user of a mobile device takes a picture of a nearby landmark or building or street and transmits that picture via his device's wireless link to a remote server. The server has the capability of identifying the location from the photo by matching it against publicly available online collections of images, such as Flickr. The server executes a location identification algorithm to match the received photo to those in the collection to determine the actual location of the photo. Typically the images in the collections have metadata, such as textual tags. Upon identifying the most likely location of the received photo from the user, the server transmits back to the user's mobile computing device an indication of the location, such as a textual location description from the tag, a map or directions to a particular location. This is especially useful in a city or dense urban environment and where the mobile computing device does not have GPS capability or its GPS is inoperative.

First claim

The invention claimed is:

1. A method comprising:
receiving, by a processor, an image of a location captured by a remote mobile computing device;
accessing, by the processor, at least one database comprising a plurality of images, the plurality of images having tags denoting respective locations associated with the images;
scanning, by the processor, the at least one database based on the tags of the plurality of images;
matching, by the processor, the images in the at least…

Assignees

• Yahoo Inc

Inventors

• Chen Chien-Hung Z

Classifications

• G06F16/587

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06K9/00637 Primary

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06T1/0021

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06F17/30247

  Physics · mapped topic

• H04L67/18

  Electricity · mapped topic