Exploiting User Generated Content for Mountain Peak Detection

Abstract

We present a system for the classification of mountain panoramas from user-generated photographs followed by identification and extraction of mountain peaks from those panoramas. We have developed an automatic technique that, given as input a geo-tagged photograph, estimates its FOV (Field Of View) and the direction of the camera using a matching algorithm on the photograph edge maps and a rendered view of the mountain silhouettes that should be seen from the observer’s point of view. The extraction algorithm then identifies the mountain peaks present in the photograph and their profiles. We discuss possible applications in social fields like photographs peaks tagging on social portals, augmented reality on mobile devices when viewing a mountain panorama, and generation of collective intelligence systems (such as environmental models) from massive social media collections (e.g. snow water availability maps based on mountain peaks states extracted from photographs hosting services).