Identifying authoritative sources of multimedia content: mining specificity and expertise from large-scale multimedia databases.

We present a framework for identifying authoritative sources (such as web sites or individual users) that are likely to produce high-quality or interesting images. We construct a directed graph across sources based on the propensity of one source to "cite" the content from another. A graph-centrality measure scores the authority for each source, which could then be applied for retrieval purposes. We apply this method to web image retrieval, where web sites are the sources, and citations are found via copy detection; and on a photo sharing site, where individuals are the sources and citations are users' favorites. We are able to identify primary or influential sources of media while avoiding the computational cost of other approaches.