NUS Computing - Lost? Eyes in the sky can tell you where you are

Towering trees and skyscrapers become mere pixels, roads and rivers now thin winding ribbons, and vast tracts of land appear as tiny thumbnails below. The familiar can become unrecognizable as we're transported from the ground up into the air. People sometimes struggle with this change in perspective, and it turns out machines do too -- especially those tasked with helping to make navigation easier. Striving to create more accurate geolocation systems, researchers have in recent years been making use of satellite imagery. The underlying idea is simple: take the image in question and compare it with those from a database of geotagged satellite images.