Ubiquitous picture-rich content representation

Abstract

The amount of digital images taken by the average consumer is consistently increasing. People enjoy the convenience of storing and sharing their pictures through online (digital) and offline (traditional) media. A set of pictures can be uploaded to: online photo services, web blogs and social network websites. Alternatively, these images can be used to generate: prints, cards, photo books or other photo products. Through uploading and sharing, images are easily transferred from one format to another. And often, a different set of associated content (text, tags) is created across formats. For example, on his web blog, a user may journal his experiences of his recent travel; on his social network website, his friends tag and comment on the pictures; in his online photo album, some pictures are titled and keyword-tagged. When the user wants to tell a complete story, perhaps in a photo book, he must collect, across all formats: the pictures, writings and comments, etc. and organize them in a book format. The user has to arrange the content of his trip in each format. The arrangement, the associations between the images, tags, keywords and text, cannot be shared with other formats. In this paper, we propose a system that allows the content to be easily created and shared across various digital media formats. We define a uniformed data association structure to connect: images, documents, comments, tags, keywords and other data. This content structure allows the user to switch representation formats without reediting. The framework under each format can emphasize (display or hide) content elements based on preference. For example, a slide show view will emphasize the display of pictures with limited text; a blog view will display highlighted images and journal text; and the photo book will try to fit in all images and text content. In this paper, we will discuss the strategy to associate pictures with text content, so that it can naturally tell a story. We will also list sample solutions on different formats such as: picture view, blog view and photo book view.