Can people find you from a picture recognition app? Well, the answer to that is yes and a no also. It depends whether you turned the Location Services on.
Still, there’s an exception to the rule in one part of Cambridge, England. Learn more below.
PoseNet
What is PoseNet? It is an app that knows exactly where you were standing when you took a photo. Yes, it won’t even need your GPS coordinates.
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PoseNet can tell the exact location of any photo. And, even the direction the photographer was facing.
What’s More?
Moreover, turning off your GPS isn’t sufficient to let PoseNet pinpoint the location of your home.
Yes, showing PoseNet a photo is a scary thing. Why? If you show PoseNet a photo, it will tell you exactly where it was taken.
Then, it identifies the scene in the image. As a result, it can tell where you were standing based on that.
Meanwhile, the system is definite to six feet. And within three degrees, it can tell which way you were facing when you took the photo.
The System
It uses a deep convolutional neural network, which is based on the way the visual cortex of animals processes visual stimuli.
Thus, it can be used for image recognition. And, it can even pick out faces from a crowd, despite being upside down or partially hidden.
Advantages
- It is fast.
It will tell you where it’s taken within five milliseconds.
- Next, it’s lightweight.
Yes, its database is fewer than 50 megabytes, unlike most systems that need gigabytes.
How It Works
However, PoseNet demands training first. How?
You need to show it many photographs. Then, it analyzes them and reduces them to a small database.
Furthermore, images must have a 3-D camera location data label. Thus, telling the system which way the camera was facing.
Don’t Worry That Much
Yes, you don’t have to be so worrisome about PostNet that much. Why?
Because PoseNet only runs in one part of Cambridge, England.
The system has a data set of 12,000 images, covering six scenes around Cambridge University.
However, its quickness and low storage make it easier to scale for worldwide use. So, what if this tech was granted access to Google’s Street View data?
Well, that would be much of a worry to you if that happens.
Speaking Of Google
The search company will also attempt to do the same thing. Like PoseNet, they will try to locate a photo just by looking at it.
That is where Google’s PlaNet comes to play.
But, Google’s PlaNet manages to place just 3.6% of images at street-level accuracy. The success rate rises to 10.1% at the city level.
Conclusion
The rest of us might think twice about posting our photos online.
With this kind of technology, even scrubbing our GPS coordinates wouldn’t help us.
So, can people find you from a picture recognition app? You can now know what the answer is.
In the future, these changes can be overwhelming and at the same time scary.
But, looking at the bigger picture, can also help law enforcement to track cybercriminals and more.
Because PoseNet can estimate the camera’s location in metric coordinates.
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