Abstract

After hundreds of years of human settlement, each city has formed a distinct identity, distinguishing itself from other cities. In this work, we propose to characterize the identity of a city via an attribute analysis of 2 million geo-tagged images from 21 cities over 3 continents. First, we estimate the scene attributes of these images and use this rep- resentation to build a higher-level set of 7 city attributes, tailored to the form and function of cities. Then, we conduct the city identity recog- nition experiments on the geo-tagged images and identify images with salient city identity on each city attribute. Based on the misclassifica- tion rate of the city identity recognition, we analyze the visual similarity among different cities. Finally, we discuss the potential application of computer vision to urban planning.