Personal media reunion: Re-collecting media content scattered over smart devices and social networks

Abstract

With the rapidly growing use of smart phones it becomes easier for people to document social events. Parts of the multimedia content are shared on social networks like Facebook, while others stay private on the users' phones. Friends also add content of the same event to Facebook. The media content of social events is becoming scattered over different accounts and becomes increasingly difficult for the user to re-collect, especially with the absence of the EXIF-header in Facebook. In this paper, we introduce an approach that supports the users in automatically detecting distributed event content after selecting very few photos and videos on the phone. We use the metadata of the content on the phone to increase the initial seeds, and then we exploit a novel face recognition approach using the social context, and a probabilistic fusion model to detect the distributed media content between several social contacts on Facebook to the respective events. Our event content detection significantly outperforms other approaches that give poor result in metadata-unfriendly environment such as Facebook. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.