Automatic Summarization of Personal Photo Collections

AbstractPhoto taking and sharing devices (e.g., smart phones, digital cameras, etc) have become extremely popular in recent times. Photo enthusiasts today capture moments of their personal lives using these devices. This has resulted in huge collections of photos stored in various personal archives. The exponential growth of online social networks and web based photo sharing platforms have added fuel to this fire. According to recent estimates [46], three billion photos are uploaded on the social network Facebook per month. This photo data overload has created some major challenges. One of the them is automatic generation of representative overviews from large photo collections. Manual browsing of photo corpora is not only tedious, but also time inefficient. Hence, development of an automatic photo summarization system is not only a research but also a practical challenge. In this dissertation, we present a principled approach for generation of size constrained overview summaries from large personal photo collections.