Learning Generalized Zero-Shot Learners for Open-Domain Image Geolocalization

By understanding the hidden locational clues in images, entirely new approaches of analyzing the natural and built environment are being opened up with profound implications for a number of fields, ranging from the recognition of weather, season, and climate patterns to rural and urban scene understanding, and improvements in navigation and self-driving car technology. Since the beginning of 2022, image geolocalization has additionally garnered extensive media coverage for becoming an immediate priority of investigative journalists and open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers in their attempt to verify information and to document war atrocities in Ukraine, extracting geolocational information from social media content. Despite high academic and public interest, image geolocalization remains an extremely challenging problem. This is because training datasets are geographically sparse, often limited to specific countries, and biased towards urban or rural scenes. The task is further complicated by the fact that geolocalization requires reasoning on multiple levels of geographic granularity (e.g.