Creating visual summaries for geographic regions
Résumé
Queries for place names represent a hefty chunk of Web image searches. Generic image retrieval solutions do not use any geographic information to improve the results for queries with place names, while systems like Flickr Places [3] or Panoramio [11] exploit raw georeferencing information to illustrate places. In this paper, we present a method for generating informative and diversified visual summaries (photographic representations) of places by using a geographical gazetteer. The gazetteer is built from user-contributed data and its content reflects a community-based perception of places. We evaluate our image retrieval method against Flickr and Flickr Places and show that the obtained results are significantly improved compared to these two baseline applications.