Automatic image representation for content-based access to personal photo album

The proposed work exploits methods and techniques for automatic characterization of images for content-based access to personal photo libraries, Several techniques, even if not reliable enough to address the general problem of content-based image retrieval, have been proven quite robust in a limited domain such as the one of personal photo album. In particular, starting from the observation that most personal photos depict a usually small number of people in a relatively small number of different contexts (e.g. Beach, Public Garden, Indoor, Nature, Snow, City, etc..) we propose the use of automatic techniques borrowed from the fields of computer vision and pattern recognition to index images based on who is present in the scene and on the context where the picture were taken. Experiments on a personal photo collection of about a thousand images proved that relatively simple content-based techniques lead to surprisingly good results in term of easyness of user access to the data. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.