Machine learning system can ID cities via pics

It is instead the details woven into the urban fabric that form a pattern, according to a machine learning system that's part of a U.S.-French visual data mining project. Yes, computers are learning to ID your city just by looking at random photos.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and INRIA/Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris had the system look at 40,000 Google Street View images of Paris, London, New York, and Barcelona, as well as eight other cities to find frequent and unique elements.The machine learning program found features like the street signs, balconies, and lampposts of Paris to be distinct. Check out the vid below.

However, "it had more trouble identifying geo-informative elements for U.S. cities, which the researches attributed to the relative lack of stylistic coherence in American cities with their melting pot of styles and influences," according to a CMU release.In other words, U.S. cities are a bland mishmash of styles. As if we needed fancy-shmancy programs to reveal that.