Visual understanding by mining social media: recent advances and challenges

Abstract

With the rapid increase in social websites that has dramatically increased the volume of social media, which includes the use of images and videos, visual understanding has attracted great interest in several areas such as multimedia, computer vision, and pattern recognition. Valuable auxiliary resources available on social websites, such as user-provided tags, aid in the tasks of visual understanding. Therefore, several methods have been proposed for exploring the auxiliary resources for tag refinement, image retrieval, and media summarization. This work conducts a comprehensive survey of recent advances in visual understanding by mining social media in order to discuss their merits and limitations. We then analyze the difficulties and challenges of visual understanding followed by several possible future research directions.