Detecting cultural differences using consumer-generated geotagged photos

Abstract

We propose a novel method to detect cultural differences over the world automatically by using a large amount of geotagged images on the photo sharing Web sites such as Flickr. We employ the state-of-the-art object recognition technique developed in the research community of computer vision to mine representative photos of the given concept for representative local regions from a large-scale unorganized collection of consumer-generated geotagged photos. The results help us understand how objects, scenes or events corresponding to the same given concept are visually different depending on local regions over the world.