Pinpoint: Grounded Worldwide Image Geolocation via Cross-Source Retrieval and Reranking

Worldwide image geolocalization, which aims to predict the GPS coordinates of any image on Earth, remains challenging due to global visual diversity. Recent generative approaches based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) leverage candidates retrieved from fixed databases for reasoning, but often struggle with scenes that are absent from the reference set. In this work, we propose GeoSearch, an open-world geolocation framework that integrates web-scale reverse image search into the RAG pipeline. GeoSearch augments LMM prompts with database-retrieved coordinates and textual evidence extracted from web pages. To mitigate noise from irrelevant content, we introduce a two-layer filtering mechanism consisting of image matching, followed by confidence-based gating. Experiments on standard benchmarks Im2GPS3k and YFCC4k demonstrate the superiority of GeoSearch under leakage-aware evaluation. Our code and data are publicly available to support reproducibility.

Worldwide image geo-localization aims to determine where on Earth a single image was captured. However, visually similar scenes may lie thousands of kilometers apart, so methods that localize primarily by appearance often mistake a distant look-alike for the true location. We attribute this failure to a structural cause: in existing methods, GPS coordinates serve only as training supervision, and the distance relationships among locations never enter the learned representation. To address this, we propose GeoMetric, a retrieval-based framework that encodes GPS coordinates relationally rather than in isolation, injecting the distance structure among locations into both representation learning and inference. GeoMetric comprises three components: (1) a Transformer-based GPS encoder with distance-aware location attention that modulates inter-sample aggregation by great-circle proximity; (2) a trimodal contrastive objective that aligns images, geo-textual descriptions, and GPS embeddings in a unified space; and (3) a retrieval-augmented inference stage that supplies large multimodal models (LMMs) with contrastive candidate context for grounded coordinate reasoning. Extensive experiments on IM2GPS, IM2GPS3k, YFCC4k, and YFCC26k demonstrate that GeoMetric consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving street-level accuracy (within 1 km) by 1.5%, 0.9%, 6.9%, and 2.5%, respectively. Controlled ablations confirm that the gains originate from the proposed geographic encoding rather than any specific LMM.

Worldwide image geolocalization-the task of predicting GPS coordinates from images taken anywhere on Earth-poses a fundamental challenge due to the vast diversity in visual content across regions. While recent approaches adopt a two-stage pipeline of retrieving candidates and selecting the best match, they typically rely on simplistic similarity heuristics and point-wise supervision, failing to model spatial relationships among candidates. In this paper, we propose GeoRanker, a distance-aware ranking framework that leverages large vision-language models to jointly encode query-candidate interactions and predict geographic proximity. In addition, we introduce a multi-order distance loss that ranks both absolute and relative distances, enabling the model to reason over structured spatial relationships. To support this, we curate GeoRanking, the first dataset explicitly designed for geographic ranking tasks with multimodal candidate information. GeoRanker achieves state-of-the-art results on two well-established benchmarks (IM2GPS3K and YFCC4K), significantly outperforming current best methods.