Can Software Guess Where A Photo Was Taken?

It sounds crazy: Can a computer program accurately guess where an outdoor photograph was taken? Complex image recognition like this is a very difficult task for computer software. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon tried to see how close they could get. Working with a pool of geotagged photos from Flickr, they wrote software that analyzes image characteristics like color, texture and line patterns. It then compares the images to other images that have known locations. Under certain conditions, their software was able to estimate the image's true location at 30 times better than chance. Far from perfect, but it's something. Ars Technica has a good summary of the research. If you want to dig deeper, read the report here (PDF).