Support regions and images for photo event retrieval

The notion of event conveys rich semantics to consumers in their collection of photos. Our user studies confirm that consumers would like to organize and access their digital photo memories by events, complemented by other semantic axes such as people, time, and place. In this paper, we address photo event retrieval by means of semantic support regions and images. Semantic support regions are salient image regions that exhibit semantic meanings and that can be learned from sample images to span a new indexing space. Semantic support images are key photos derived statistically to model photo events. Retrieval of a photo event is performed using a winner-take-all approach to compute the relevance measure of a given photo to the event models. This novel approach for photo event retrieval is experimented on 2400 heterogeneous consumer photos with very promising results.