I'm currently thinking of ideas for my final year dissertation project. I'm in my last year of Computer Science, and have a number of ideas. What I'm trying to see now is that if I can attempt such a project. What I'm planning to do is find out where an image is on a map, but I want to be able to find it, even if the EXIF data for the image doesn't contain a longitude/latitude.
i.e., I'm wondering is it possible to do so without using EXIF data. Can I use API's to compare the image to other images on Google/Streetview/Twitter/Facebook/Instragram etc?
Has anyone got any experience in doing this? Any advice or points of interest would be really helpful.
Definitely possible, but difficult to do with accuracy and a high hit rate. As far as I know there is no public API for this, so you'd need to build your own corpus of georeferenced images and matching algorithms to match your image against a set of georeferenced ones.
Check out the IM2GPS project at Carnegie Mellon and the associated Google Tech Talk, as well as the paper describing the project. There are the references at the end of the paper for more reading.