Photography and Exploration of Tourist Locations Based on Optimal Foraging Theory

Animals search for food in their environment with a decision strategy which keeps them fit. Optimal foraging theory models this foraging behavior to determine the optimal decision strategy followed by animals. This theory has been successfully applied for humans as they search for information and is termed as information foraging. When people visit a tourist location, they follow a similar strategy to move from one spot to another, and collect information by capturing photographs. This behavior has similarities with the foraging behavior of animals which has been widely studied by the researchers. In this paper, we propose to employ optimal foraging theory to help tourists explore a location and capture photographs in an optimal way. We determine a decision strategy for tourist which provides a list of interesting spots to visit in a tourist location along with corresponding stay time. Finally, we solve an optimization problem to find a path through these spots which can be followed by tourists. The experimental results on a public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. ^{1 1}

Code available at https://github.com/vyzuer/foraging_theory