Photowalking the city: Comparing hypotheses about urban photo trails on flickr

Abstract

Understanding human movement trajectories represents an important problem that has implications for a range of societal challenges such as city planning and evolution, public transport or crime. In this paper, we focus on geo-temporal photo trails from four different cities (Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York) derived from Flickr that are produced by humans when taking sequences of photos in urban areas. We apply a Bayesian approach called HypTrails to assess different explanations of how the trails are produced. Our results suggest that there are common processes underlying the photo trails observed across the studied cities. Furthermore, information extracted from social media, in the form of concepts and usage statistics from Wikipedia, allows for constructing explanations for human movement trajectories.