Multi-Level Visual Similarity Based Personalized Tourist Attraction Recommendation Using Geo-Tagged Photos

Abstract

Geo-tagged photo-based tourist attraction recommendation can discover users’ travel preferences from their taken photos, so as to recommend suitable tourist attractions to them. However, existing visual content-based methods cannot fully exploit the user and tourist attraction information of photos to extract visual features, and do not differentiate the significance of different photos. In this article, we propose multi-level visual similarity-based personalized tourist attraction recommendation using geo-tagged photos (MEAL). MEAL utilizes the visual contents of photos and interaction behavior data to obtain the final embeddings of users and tourist attractions, which are then used to predict the visit probabilities. Specifically, by crossing the user and tourist attraction information of photos, we define four visual similarity levels and introduce a corresponding quintuplet loss to embed the visual contents of photos. In addition, to capture the significance of different photos, we exploit the self-attention mechanism to obtain the visual representations of users and tourist attractions. We conducted experiments on two datasets crawled from Flickr, and the experimental results proved the advantage of this method.