Attributing semantics to personal photographs

A major bottleneck for the efficient management of personal photographic collections is the large gap between low-level image features and high-level semantic contents of images. This paper proposes and evaluates two methodologies for making appropriate (re)use of natural language photographic annotations for extracting references to people, location and objects and propagating any location references encountered to previously unannotated images. The evaluation identifies the strengths of each approach and shows extraction and propagation results with promising accuracy.

Fabio CiravegnaEmail:

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Rodrigo F. Carvalho   is a Ph.D. student at the University of Sheffield, UK. His research interests lie in the application of contextual and social information for enhancing image related metadata with the intent of improving future retrieval and sharing of photographic resources. He has worked previously on European and commercial research projects targeted towards the extraction of information for use in emergency response scenarios and for the management of personal photographic memories. Sam Chapman   is a senior Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, UK. His research investigates cutting edge semantic technology to facilitate knowledge processes across large organisations with a focus upon search, acquisition and integration of knowledge from various media. He works on a number of european, national and commercial research projects concerning the needs of aerospace, historical research, archaeology support, personal photographic memories and emergency response amongst others. He is also the Director of Technology for Knowledge Now Ltd where he commercialises knowledge acquisition and query technologies to aid a wide variety of industries. Fabio Ciravegna   is Professor of Language and Knowledge Technologies at the University of Sheffield. He is Director of the European Integrated Project IST X-Media (), and principal investigator in several European and National projects. He coordinates industrial projects funded by Rolls-Royce plc, Kodak Eastman and Lycos Europe. He is member of the editorial board of the International Journal on “Web Semantics” and of the “International Journal of Human Computer Studies”. Fabio is general chair of the 6th European Semantic Web Conference (2009) (). He is director of K-Now Ltd, a spin-off company supporting dynamic distributed communities in large organizations. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia and a doctorship from the University of Torino, Italy.