Camera Elevation Estimation from a Single Mountain Landscape Photograph

In outdoor environments one of the most important and informative attributes is the elevation: the height of a geographic location above the sea level. However, almost all currently available photos and videos lack elevation information. Moreover, a majority of them do not even contain the GPS coordinates. This work addresses the problem of camera elevation estimation from visual information contained in a landscape photograph. We introduce a new Alps100K dataset of annotated (GPS coordinates, elevation, EXIF if available) outdoor images from mountain environments. We create a list of all hills and mountain peaks located in the seven Alpine countries from the OpenStreetMap database. The list of hill names is used to query the Flickr photo hosting service. The final collection contains 98136 outdoor images that span almost all possible elevations observed in the Alps [0, 4782m] and covers vast geographic area of the Alps. The images span all the seasons of the year and exhibit high variation in landscape appearance, see Fig. 1.