Exploiting Social-Mobile Information for Location Visualization

Abstract

With a smart phone at hand, it becomes easy now to snap pictures and publish them online with few lines of texts. The GPS coordinates and User-Generated Content (UGC) data embedded in the shared photos provide opportunities to exploit important knowledge to tackle interesting tasks like geographically organizing photos and location visualization. In this work, we propose to organize photos both geographically and semantically, and investigate the problem of location visualization from multiple semantic themes. The novel visualization scheme provides a rich display landscape for geographical exploration from versatile views. A two-level solution is presented, where we first identify the highly photographed places of interest (POI) and discover their focused themes, and then aggregate the lower-level POI themes to generate the higher-level city themes for location visualization. We have conducted experiments on crawled Flickr and Instagram data and exhibited the visualization for the cities of Singapore and Sydney. The experimental results have validated the proposed method and demonstrated the potentials of location visualization from multiple themes.