PhotoMap - Automatic spatiotemporal annotation for mobile photos

Abstract

The amount of photos in personal digital collections has grown rapidly making their management and retrieval a complicated task. In addition, existing tools performing manual spatial and content annotation are still time consuming for the users. To annotate automatically these photos using mobile devices is the emerging solution to decrease the lack of the description in photo files. In this context, this paper proposes a mobile and location-based system, called PhotoMap, for the automatic annotation and the spatiotemporal visualization of photo collections. PhotoMap uses the new technologies of the Semantic Web in order to infer information about the taken photos and to improve both the visualization and the retrieval. We also present a demonstration of the PhotoMap application during a tourist tour in the city of Grenoble. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.