Towards retrieving social events from spatio-temporal photo annotation

An event can be defined as a happening that gathers people with some common goal over a period of time and in a certain place. This paper presents a new method to retrieve social events through annotations in spatio-temporal photo collections, known as STEve-PR (Spatio-Temporal EVEnt Photo Retrieval). The proposed technique uses a clustering algorithm to gather similar photos by considering the location, date and time of the photos. The STEve-PR clustering approach clusters photos belonging to the same event. STEve-PR uses spatial clusters created to propagate event annotation between photos in the same cluster and employs TF-IDF similarity between tags to find the spatial cluster with the highest similarity for photos without a geographical location. We evaluated our approach on a public database.