Exploiting Users´ Personal and Public Information for Personal Photo Annotation

Annotation is the core item to enable efficient access to media. Thus, automatic annotation is a highly challenging problem. We present a novel solution to personal digital photograph annotation problem which annotates photo based on users´ personal, and public information. We use timestamps of photo together with exact location name as pivots to search for more contextual metadata from users´ emails, schedules, web browsing histories and public information repositories such as online encyclopedia and news Web sites. A notable contribution of our approach is that it can effectively leverage the background information of users´ daily activities and their ambient environment to semi-automatically annotate their photographs. Experimental results conducted with 10 subjects and a total of 313 photos show that we can reduce 33% of annotation time over manual annotation and we also obtain very encouraging accuracy results.