Epitomize Your Photos

With the rapid growth of digital photography, sharing of photos with friends and family has become very popular. When people share their photos, they usually organize them into albums according to events or places. To tell the story of some important events in one’s life, it is desirable to have an efficient summarization tool which can help people to receive a quick overview of an album containing large number of photos. In this paper, we present and analyze an approach for photo album summarization through a novel social game “Epitome” as a Facebook application. This social game can collect research data, and, at the same time, it provides a collage or a cover photo of the user’s photo album, while the user enjoys playing the game. The proof of concept of the proposed method is demonstrated through a set of experiments on several photo albums. As a benchmark comparison to this game, we perform automatic visual analysis considering several state-of-the-art features. We also evaluate the usability of the game by making use of a questionnaire on several subjects who played the “Epitome” game. Furthermore, we address privacy issues concerning shared photos in Facebook applications. 1. Introduction Rapid growth of digital photography in recent years has increased the size of personal photo collections. People use their digital cameras or mobile phones equipped with cameras to take photos. Besides storing them on computer hard drives, they often share their digital photos with friends, family, and colleagues through social networks. Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/), Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/), and Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/) are examples of such photo sharing web sites. Some people also print their photos on post cards, calendars, or photo books, often to give them as presents or to create physical souvenirs. Photos are often organized into albums (collections) based on places, events or dates, and people. Consumers tend to take several photos from one scene, hoping that one of them will be outstanding, and this leads to large number of similar photos. Therefore, it can be very time-consuming to go through all photos in one of these albums. Summarization is an effective way to provide a quick overview of a set of photos. In this paper, album summarization is defined as selecting a set of photos from a larger collection which best represents the visual information of the entire collection. Selected photos can be used to create a collage of a given album or a cover for an album or to be included in a photo book. However, as already mentioned,