[HN Gopher] GeoGuessing with Deep Learning
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GeoGuessing with Deep Learning
Author : healeycodes
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-03-24 08:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (healeycodes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (healeycodes.com)
| totetsu wrote:
| This could be useful for finding new places to go that are look
| similar to your holiday snaps. Also if I could do this with a
| picture of food I want to eat.. and it guess the probable
| location of a restaurant serving it, that would be great.
| wp381640 wrote:
| I started working on a similar project - my approach was to train
| a model based on all of the geoguessr contest sets.
|
| Geoguessr gives you both the street view _and_ the correct answer
| when you guess wrong.
|
| They're all hand-curated so there are only so many points that
| you need to identify (the largest sets are 100k+ points) so the
| idea would be to run through it thousands of times with wrongs
| answers but use the correct answer to train the model
|
| It's only a matter of time before the game has cheat bots and
| that problem, much in the same way online chess has that issue
| luguenth wrote:
| What would be the advantage to train a model on the whole
| dataset, you would be running it against later? Wouldn't that
| overfit the network?
|
| And for the cheating part; geoGuessr actually exposes the right
| answer in their API. You you could just use that to pinpoint
| the exact location automated.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| > What would be the advantage to train a model on the whole
| dataset, you would be running it against later? Wouldn't that
| overfit the network?
|
| The opposite, it would almost be cheating since the model
| would just have memorized all the correct solutions. You'd
| usually want to train on a subset of the data and evaluate
| against the remainder to protect against overfitting. So to
| that point I agree with your evaluation. But after that you'd
| use it with real data in the wild for your actual use case.
| With geogussr you'd know already what all the "real-world"
| situations are and overfitting wouldn't matter as long as you
| retrain wherever they add new sets.
| benatkin wrote:
| Ooh, this is great. I love GeoGuessr and have pointed several
| people to it. I have thought that a trained AI could do better
| than me on average.
|
| I've been posting my runs publicly to Strava for years. I
| recently started living in a small town and decided to stop
| posting my location, and using an open source tool called
| RunnerUp to track my runs. I have still been posting running
| photos that don't reveal my location. I know someday people will
| be able to figure out my location despite avoiding taking
| pictures with signs and stuff. If anyone wants to try to figure
| out one of my recent locations, my instagram link is in my bio.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| It's wild how we're anonymous on the internet, right up until
| we're not! I was watching an auction on bringatrailer.com (an
| auto auction website where people sell cars and discuss them in
| a comments section) the other day. One commenter realized he
| could distantly see his house in a stranger's auction photos!
| The person posting the photos probably never considered that
| the photo location would be precisely identifiable (and for
| this purpose, probably didn't care). But if you get enough eyes
| on something, someone is going to recognize it.
| bvm wrote:
| You know how you get off a plane and everything about a place
| 3000 miles away feels different? Not just smells and heat, but
| the light seems different. The surfaces and materials are
| different. The uh...(actual) atmosphere seems different.
|
| Is for example, the atmosphere seeming different a real physical
| phenomenon that could be detected by ML?
| qayxc wrote:
| Sure, why not? Chemical composition, temperature, and pressure
| of the atmosphere are just physical parameters (e.g. elements
| of a feature set) like any other (e.g. colour and intensity of
| pixels in an image).
|
| Everything that can be measured can be used as an input for ML
| algorithms. The things that "feel" different are the result of
| the "post-processing" your brain applies to the inputs it
| receives (olfactory, temperature, light intensity and -spectral
| composition, etc.).
|
| The sensation is based on physical phenomena, though it might
| be interesting how much of it remains if we were to take the
| _knowledge_ about the change of location away, e.g. would you
| feel the same way if you didn 't know you were 3000 miles away?
| In other words, does knowing about the change in location
| sharpen your senses such that you subconsciously look for
| changes in the environment?
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| I've never traveled like this, merely drove cross-country and
| didn't experience this. Does it really feel so different?
| jibolso wrote:
| Nicely done. It will be interesting to see the results when you
| combine multiple modalities.
| tobr wrote:
| GeoGuessr is a lot of fun. I played it a lot a few years ago, but
| only recently discovered that there's a community of very serious
| players, and got interested in it again. For example check this
| video from yesterday where Tom Davies aka GeoWizard[1] gets a
| pretty good score on An Urban World:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=TVt1GKBZMzc
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoWizard
| herbstein wrote:
| Tom Davis is very good at the game. I also recommend checking
| out his "straight line mission" videos. He tries crossing Wales
| (and more recently Norway) in a single straight line. Deviating
| by only a few feet across the trips. He manages to make it
| quite interesting to "just" watch a man walking in fields.
| herbstein wrote:
| I thought a link was in order here. First video of his first
| "mission". Not everything he does is strictly legal, but it's
| never malicious.
|
| https://youtu.be/M7w986ni7_g
| nindalf wrote:
| I've only seen someone else play it but it's crazy how serious
| he was about it. Apart from the basic things like narrowing
| down based on languages in sign posts, he'd also use techniques
| like deriving latitude based on trees. This is gorgc on twitch,
| but I'm sure there are other streamers who play this game.
| sllabres wrote:
| The linked article
| https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/geoguessr-...
| is interesting -- at least for me, a very casual player ;).
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| I'm a fairly casual player too, and I guess I have my
| favorite aspects of the game - I've worked with foreign
| languages before so language identification is fun for me,
| and I'm a car enthusiast so I like informing guesses based on
| the cars I see. One thing this article raised that I'd never
| considered was the direction that satellite dishes face.
| Definitely going to keep my eye out for that!
| schoen wrote:
| I got into GeoGuessr during the pandemic, and am still very
| into it! I can really recommend it as a way to learn about more
| of the world while you're stuck at home.
|
| Since I'm very interested in languages, I'm often surprised at
| how difficult other players sometimes find it to be to
| recognize specific languages (e.g. the differences between
| Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, and Italian are quite
| obvious to me, but often not to many other players).
|
| But I also notice that there are many, many world languages
| that I can't recognize easily; for Geogussr purposes in
| particular the most relevant for me right now are the Slavic
| languages (I can tell Polish apart from the others written in
| Latin script, but have trouble distinguishing the others that
| are written in that script; I have trouble distinguishing the
| Slavic languages that are written in Cyrillic; and I also have
| trouble distinguishing the Central Asian languages that are
| written in Cyrillic that are not from the Slavic family).
|
| Wikipedia has a great chart to help you recognize languages
| even without learning to speak or understand them
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition...
|
| and I'm currently writing a language recognition trainer
| (which, when it's done, will give you a sample of text and ask
| you to guess what language it is, and, if you get it wrong,
| provide some kind of tips that could help you to recognize that
| language). I plan to make it available to the public when I'm
| finished. I'd love for the ability to recognize and distinguish
| languages from one another to become more widespread. Because
| of the ubiquity and importance of English, we native English
| speakers are said to be especially bad at this... not just at
| _understanding_ other languages, but even at telling them
| apart!
| [deleted]
| dagw wrote:
| _Wikipedia has a great chart to help you recognize languages
| even without learning to speak or understand them:_
|
| That would be awesome as an interactive flowchart
| chanind wrote:
| I wondered if this could be useful for open source journalism
| stuff like bellingcat does. Essentially combing through tons of
| photos online to figure out where / when they were taken and Put
| together an understanding of an incident
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| I'm a GeoGuessr fan, and like the author, experienced a bit of a
| GeoGuessr renaissance when I had a baby. I guess it's the sort of
| slow, quiet game that lends itself to being played between baby
| care tasks.
|
| In any case, the criteria discussed here is the sort of thing
| that all too often makes me skeptical of deep learning results.
|
| There are the things that I consider "real" discriminators when
| playing the game - architectural styles, building materials, road
| quality, driving direction, alphabets/languages on signage,
| flags, flora, topography, makes/types of vehicles, skin color and
| clothing style of humans, etc. Then there are the "artificial"
| things - glimpses at the street view vehicle, copyright notices,
| image quality, knowledge of which countries do or don't have
| Google Street View coverage, etc.
|
| Obviously by taking what I'm calling the "artificial" criteria
| into account a deep learning approach would score better today
| than if only the "real" criteria were considered. But I feel like
| if tomorrow, GeoGuessr swapped Apple Maps Look Around or Bing
| Maps StreetSide in place of Google Street View (or if Google
| released vastly updated imagery), the deep learning approach
| would fall apart, but humans who have built knowledge of the
| "real" features to look for would continue to do just about as
| well.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Coming from 64 degrees north I always react when I see
| satellite dishes tilted _up_ and realized a satellite dish is
| an exact indication - to the degree! - of latitude.
|
| Some climates can be deceiving depending on local conditions
| (Gulf Stream makes Western Europe have flora like much more
| southern parts of North America for example) but satellite
| dishes work the same everywhere.
| hyper_reality wrote:
| Interesting post, but I disagree with the conclusion that with a
| bit of work AI could take down the best Geoguessrs. The best
| players already take into account all the metadata like camera
| quality and distinctive features of the Google car. Furthermore,
| they would surely have an edge in urban locations where proximate
| locations are visible in street-signs. I could be proven wrong
| though, and it would be super interesting to reverse engineer AI
| guesses that turn out to be surprisingly correct based off little
| info.
|
| To see just how good the top players are at instantly recognising
| a country using these clues, then check out
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmoAYpTJuA . Or maybe don't if
| you don't want the game spoiled!
| tobr wrote:
| > I disagree with the conclusion that with a bit of work AI
| could take down the best Geoguessrs. The best players already
| take into account all the metadata like camera quality and
| distinctive features of the Google car.
|
| Isn't this exactly what an AI might do even better, though?
| There might be statistical variations in image quality between
| cameras and processing that are imperceptible to a human but
| easy for machine learning to pick up?
| hyper_reality wrote:
| True, but less than half of world countries are covered by
| street view and it's possible for a human to learn the
| distinctive metadata features of every single one, together
| with all the common roadside features like poles, road
| markings, and vegetation. So I don't know if the level of
| granularity where statistical variations are noticed is
| required to succeed at least in determining the country.
|
| But in terms of picking the closest point within a country,
| perhaps with a large enough dataset the AI would be able to
| distinguish based on local weather conditions when the Google
| car was driving through certain regions. And this would trump
| the player's ability to read place names and signage.
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(page generated 2021-03-25 23:04 UTC)