We present a first method for the automated age estimation of buildings from unconstrained photographs. To this end, we propose a two-stage approach that firstly learns characteristic visual patterns for different building epochs at patch-level and then globally aggregates patch-level age estimates over the building. We compile evaluation datasets from different sources and perform an detailed evaluation of our approach, its sensitivity to parameters, and the capabilities of the employed deep networks to learn characteristic visual age-related patterns. Results show that our approach is able to estimate building age at a surprisingly high level that even outperforms human evaluators and thereby sets a new performance baseline. This work represents a first step towards the automated assessment of building parameters for automated price prediction.
CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Information retrieval; • Computing methodologies → Visual content-based indexing and retrieval; Supervised learning; Neural networks; KEYWORDS Content-based image retrieval, visual pattern extraction, image classification, building analysis, building age estimation, deep learning.
In this paper, a dataset of geotagged photos on a world-wide scale is presented. The dataset contains a sample of more than 14 million geotagged photos crawled from Flickr with the corresponding metadata. To guarantee the spatial representativeness of the dataset, a crawling approach based on the small-world phenomena and the Flickr friendship's graph is applied. Furthermore, the noisiness of user-provided tags is reduced through an automatic tag cleaning approach. To enable efficient retrieval, photos in the dataset are indexed based on their location information using quad-tree data structure. The dataset can assists different applications, especially, search-based automatic image annotation and reverse geotagging 1 .
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