Exploring and browsing photos through characteristic geographic tag regions

Abstract

We present a system that supports zoomable browsing and exploration of photos taken across the globe. Our system is based on a novel algorithm that automatically uncovers the colloquial boundaries of regions that are characteristic for individual tags used in a large collection of geo-referenced photos. We first model the data using scale-space theory, which allows us to represent it simultaneously across different scales as a family of increasingly smoothed density distributions, after which we derive the region boundaries by applying image analysis techniques to the scale-space representation of each tag. The interface visualizes the shape and size of the resulting boundaries for each tag along the dimensions of space and time across multiple scales, giving the user the ability to explore the world as patchwork of dynamic characterizing geographic tag regions and to browse through their associated photos.