A System for Real-Time High-Level Geo-Information Extraction and Fusion for Geocoded Photos

Improvements and portability of technologies and smart devices has enabled rapid growth in the amount of user generated media such as photographs and videos. Whilst various media generation and management systems exist it still remains a challenge to discover the "right" metadata information for the right purpose. This paper describes an approach to extract relevant geospatial information through reverse geocoding in addition to cross-referencing several public geospatial data sources. The extracted geospatial information can be used to enable enrichment of media with rich semantic geo-metadata and therefore enable improved organisation and searching of the media. Central to the system is the cross-referencing and data fusion of several public geospatial datasets to determine the most relevant Points of Interest and extract their relevant features. These relevant Points of Interest and features are subsequently used to annotate media with human readable information, leading to enriched media repositories. The system has been implemented as a client/server architecture, with a web interface for the client front end and Java for the backend server side processing. Details of the implementation are discussed. Testing in a scenario has been undertaken and a discussion of the testing technique and results is presented. The initial results show the system to be effective at fusing several public geospatial datasets and extracting relevant geo-metadata.