Modeling People and Places with Internet Photo Collections

Computational photography often considers sets of photos taken by a single user in a single setting, but the popularity of online social media sites has created a social aspect to photo collections as well. Photosharing sites such as Flickr and Facebook contain vast amounts of latent information about our world and human behavior. Our recent work has involved building automatic algorithms that analyze large collections of imagery in order to understand and model people and places at a global scale. Geotagged photographs can be used to identify the most photographed places on Earth, as well as to infer the names and visual representations of these places. © 2012 ACM.