OpenStreetView-5M: The Many Roads to Global Visual Geolocation

Abstract

Determining the location of an image anywhere on Earth is a complex visual task which makes it particularly relevant for evaluating computer vision algorithms. Determining the location of an image anywhere on Earth is a complex visual task which makes it particularly relevant for evaluating computer vision algorithms. Yet the absence of standard large-scale open-access datasets with reliably localizable images has limited its potential. To address this issue we introduce OpenStreetView-5M a large-scale open-access dataset comprising over 5.1 million geo-referenced street view images covering 225 countries and territories. In contrast to existing benchmarks we enforce a strict train/test separation allowing us to evaluate the relevance of learned geographical features beyond mere memorization. To demonstrate the utility of our dataset we conduct an extensive benchmark of various state-of-the-art image encoders spatial representations and training strategies. All associated codes and models can be found at https://github.com/gastruc/osv5m.