Sightseeing value estimation by analysing geosocial images

Abstract

Recommendation of points of interests (POIs) is drawing more attention to meet the growing demands of tourists. Thus, a POI's quality (sightseeing value) needs to be estimated. In contrast to conventional studies that rank POIs on the basis of user behaviour analysis, this paper presents methods to estimate quality by analysing geo-social images. Our approach estimates the sightseeing value from two aspects: 1) nature value; 2) culture value. For the nature value, we extract image features that are related to favourable human perception to verify whether a POI would satisfy tourists in terms of environmental psychology. Three criteria are defined accordingly: coherence, image-ability, and visual-scale. For the culture value, we recognise the main cultural element (i.e., architecture) included in a POI. In the experiments, we applied our methods to real POIs and found that our approach assessed sightseeing value effectively.