404 Media has obtained a cache of internal police emails showing at least two agencies have bought access to GeoSpy, an AI tool that analyzes architecture, soil, and other features to near instantly geolocate photos.
  • Pycorax@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    12 hours ago

    Not gonna lie, I’d like to use this geotag a bunch of photos that I dont have location tagged to it.

    • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      19 hours ago

      It’s doing what the Geo Guesser-like people do.

      Like ‘this kind of rock formation only appears in Eastern Europe, the wheel you see in the lower left of the screen has Cyrillic writing and if you look in eastern Europe there is one mountain formation that looks like the picture when viewed from a specific angle and so they had to be within this 50m circle’.

      • Meron35@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        28 minutes ago

        Eh, kind of both.

        When researchers peeked into which areas of the image were being used, it showed that the tiny camera watermark from the Google Streetview car was being used by the model a lot.

        That is, the recognition system had learned all the routes every Google Street view car had taken, and was using that in its recognition process.

        Not all images have this watermark though, so in the cases the watermark didn’t exist it then resorts to more traditional geoguessr tactics.

      • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        3·
        14 hours ago

        This is the kind of thing that machine learning is very very good at. Its never going to be perfect but its definitely gonna outperform humans.

        • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          10 hours ago

          In addition, any organization that’s using this at scale will also have human experts to handle the edge cases and to validate the system’s findings.

          We can’t copy the human expert without years of training, but copying a program/computer system is only a few terminal commands. The ability to do this kind of thing at scale is entirely new.

      • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        17 hours ago

        It’s not hard. I once saw a random “what is this thing” photo from a bad angle. But it included a store in the background. Only two stores in North America with that name, though Google map search tried to be helpful and return a bunch of other results. Easy enough to check both.

        Even with the extra street view angles I couldn’t figure out what the thing was though :(