Spirittagger: a geo-aware tag suggestion tool mined from flickr

Geographically referenced, or "geo-tagged," photo data sets offer tantalizing potential for automated knowledge discovery in the world. By combining tag reranking based on geographic context with content-based image analysis we are able to suggest geographically relevant tags for photos newly tagged with GPS coordinates. These tag suggestions could be used to help users organize their photo collections or improve retrieval systems. Our algorithm weights labels that correspond to pertinent objects, events, neighborhoods, and activities in a region. While previous work with geo-tagged images has focused on representative views of landmarks or estimating location, our tag suggestion tool, SpiritTagger, suggests tags that reveal an insight into the spirit, or genius loci , of a city or region. Experiments on a data set consisting of over 100,000 Flickr photos in Los Angeles and Southern California show that our geographically relevant tag suggestion tool provides a significant improvement in precision-recall performance over baseline image-based similarity suggestion.