Guest Editorial: Large Scale Visual Media Geo-Localization

Visual media geo-localization methods aim at determining where an image/video was taken and involve complex matching processes between the querymedia content (2D/3D features) and the reference data (overhead and geo-tagged ground-level imagery). This area of research encompasses many disciplines, including pre-processing and processing earth-scale overhead and ground-level reference imagery (i.e. satellite, elevation maps, LIDAR, open-street maps, geo-tagged street-view images, etc.) to extract relevant information (i.e. land-types, roads, buildings, etc.), efficient indexing of extracted geo-information, alignment and fusion of (heterogeneous) reference imageries, satellite imagery segmentation, low-level and high-level feature extraction, raytracing and synthesized imagery generation, wide imagery registration, multi-view geometry and 3D reconstruction, 2D/3D matching, geometric verification, machine learning, optimization, probabilistic inference, supervised and automatic image/video calibration, fast search, and humanmachine interaction. Advances in this research field were given great impetus by the increasing availability of computer resources