“What Makes Paris Look Like Paris?” by Erwin Gianchandani. From
the post: We all identify cities by certain attributes, such as
building architecture, street signage, even the lamp posts and
parking meters dotting the sidewalks. Now there’s a neat study
by computer graphics researchers at Carnegie Mellon University —
presented at SIGGRAPH 2012 earlier this month — that develops
novel computational techniques to analyze imagery in Google
Street View and identify what gives a city its character…. From
the abstract: Given a large repository of geotagged imagery, we
seek to automatically find visual elements, e.g. windows,
balconies, and street signs, that are most distinctive for a
certain geo-spatial area, for example the city of Paris. This is
a tremendously difficult task as the visual features
distinguishing architectural elements of different places can be
very subtle. In addition, we face a hard search problem: given
all possible patches in all images, which of them are both
frequently occurring and geogra