Photo Album Summarization

Summary

With the rapid growth of digital photography, sharing of photos with friends and family has become very popular. When people share their photos, they usually organize them into albums according to events or places. To tell the story of some important events in one’s life, it is desirable to have an efficient summarization tool which can help people to receive a quick overview of an album containing large number of photos.

We proposed an approach for photo album summarization through a novel social game “Epitome”. It has been implemented as a Facebook application and as an application for mobile phones on the Android OS platform. Our approach to album summarization consists of two games: “Select the Best!” and “Split it!”. The goal of the first game is to allow a user to select the most representative photo of a reduced set of images, while in the second game, the user has to split the reduced set into two distinct parts. The results obtained in these games are combined to produce a summarization and are then compared with the results of other users. As a final result, a unique summarization sequence of photos is determined. The determined sequence of photos can be used to create a collage of one album or a cover for an album.

Publications