Spatial Morphing Kernel Regression For Feature Interpolation

In recent years, geotagged social media has become popular as a novel source for geographic knowledge discovery. Ground-level images and videos provide a different perspective than overhead imagery and can be applied to a range of applications such as land use mapping, activity detection, pollution mapping, etc. The sparse and uneven distribution of this data presents a problem, however, for generating dense maps. We therefore investigate the problem of spatially interpolating the high-dimensional features extracted from sparse social media to enable dense labeling using standard classification. Further, we show how prior knowledge about region boundaries can be used to improve the interpolation through spatial morphing kernel regression. We show that an interpolate-then-classify framework can produce dense map from sparse observations but that care must be taken in chosing the iterpolation method. We also show that the spatial morphing kernel improves the results.