Carnegie Mellon University researchers said theirs is the first computerized "geolocation" method that can analyze a photograph and determine where on Earth the image likely was taken. It's a feat made possible by searching through millions of GPS-tagged images in the Flickr online photo collection.

The algorithm developed by graduate student James Hays and Assistant Professor Alexei Efros analyzes a photo's composition, noting how textures and colors are distributed and recording number and orientation of lines in the photo. It then searches Flickr for photos similar in appearance.

Hays and Efros found they could accurately geolocate the images within approximately 125 miles for 16 percent of more than 200 photos in their test set -- as much as 30 times better than chance.

"It seems there's not as much ambiguity in the visual world as you might guess," said Hays, who will present the research this week in Anchorage, Alaska, during an IEEE conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

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