Contextual information can have a substantial impact on the performance of visual tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and geometric estimation. Data stored in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offers a rich source of contextual information that has been largely untapped by computer vision. We propose to leverage such information for scene understanding by combining GIS resources with large sets of unorganized photographs using Structure from Motion (SfM) techniques. We present a pipeline to quickly generate strong 3D geometric priors from 2D GIS data using SfM models aligned with minimal user input. Given an image resectioned against this model, we generate robust predictions of depth, surface normals, and semantic labels. Despite the lack of detail in the model, we show that the precision of the predicted geometry is substantially more accurate than other single-image depth estimation methods. We then demonstrate the utility of these contextual constraints for re-scoring pedestrian detections, and use these GIS contextual features alongside object detection score maps to improve a CRF-based semantic segmentation framework, boosting accuracy over baseline models.

The confluence of robust algorithms for structure from motion along with high-coverage mapping and imaging of the world around us suggests that it will soon be feasible to accurately estimate camera pose for a large class photographs taken in outdoor, urban environments. In this paper, we investigate how such information can be used to improve the detection of dynamic objects such as pedestrians and cars. First, we show that when rough camera location is known, we can utilize detectors that have been trained with a scene-specific background model in order to improve detection accuracy. Second, when precise camera pose is available, dense matching to a database of existing images using multi-view stereo provides a way to eliminate static backgrounds such as building facades, akin to background-subtraction often used in video analysis. We evaluate these ideas using a dataset of tourist photos with estimated camera pose. For template-based pedestrian detection, we achieve a 50 percent boost in average precision over baseline.