Generating Visual Summaries of Geographic Areas Using Community-Contributed Images

In this paper, we present a novel approach for automatic visual summarization of a geographic area that exploits user-contributed images and related explicit and implicit metadata collected from popular content-sharing websites. By means of this approach, we search for a limited number of representative but diverse images to represent the area within a certain radius around a specific location. Our approach is based on the random walk with restarts over a graph that models relations between images, visual features extracted from them, associated text, as well as the information on the uploader and commentators. In addition to introducing a novel edge weighting mechanism, we propose in this paper a simple but effective scheme for selecting the most representative and diverse set of images based on the information derived from the graph. We also present a novel evaluation protocol, which does not require input of human annotators, but only exploits the geographical coordinates accompanying the images in order to reflect conditions on image sets that must necessarily be fulfilled in order for users to find them representative and diverse. Experiments performed on a collection of Flickr images, captured around 207 locations in Paris, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.