Personalized Economy of Images in Social Forums: An Analysis on Supply, Consumption, and Saliency

In this work, we focus on the novel problem of analyzing individual user´s behavioral patterns regarding images shared on social forums. In particular, we view diverse user activities on social multimedia services as an economy, where the first activity mode of sharing or posting is interpreted as supply, and another mode of activity such as commenting on images is interpreted as consumption. To characterize user profiles in these two behavioral modes, we propose an approach to characterize users´ supply and consumption profiles based on the image content types with which they engage. We then present various statistical analyses, which confirm that there is an unexpected significant difference between these two behavioral modes. In addition, we introduce a statistical approach to identify users with salient profiles, which can be useful for social multimedia services for blocking users with undesirable behavior or viral content promotion. We showcase the benefits of the proposed saliency detection approach and its extension to detect significant key images from a complex dataset, which exhibits the inherent multi-modal nature of user bases of social multimedia services.