Expo: An Expectation-oriented System for Selecting Important Photos from Personal Collections

Abstract

The diffusion of digital photography lets people take hundreds of photos during personal events, such as trips and ceremonies. Many methods have been developed for summarizing such large personal photo collections. However, they usually emphasize the coverage of the original collection, without considering which photos users would select, i.e. their expectations. In this paper we present Expo, a system that aims at selecting which photos users perceive as most important and would have selected, thus meeting their expectations. It does not rely on any manually provided annotation, thus keeping the effort of users low. Photos are processed by applying a wide set of image processing techniques and a subset of a required size is selected. Users can review and modify the automatic selection. The system can also be used to gather training data by letting users select their preferred photos from the imported collections.