Combining Multi-resolution Evidence for Georeferencing Flickr Images

We explore the task of determining the geographic location of photos on Flickr, using combined evidence from Naive Bayes classifiers that are trained at different spatial resolutions. In particular, we estimate the location of Flickr photos, based on their tags, at four different scales, ranging from a city-level granularity to fine-grained intra-city areas. Using Dempster-Shafer’s evidence theory, we combine the output of the different classifiers into a single mass assignment. We demonstrate experimentally that the induced belief and plausibility measures are useful to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to classify the photo at a given granularity. Thus an adaptive method is obtained, by which photos are georeferenced at the most appropriate resolution.