Photo stream alignment for collaborative photo collection and sharing in social media
Jianchao Yang, Jiebo Luo, Jie Yu, Thomas S. Huang · 2011
With the popularity of digital cameras and camera phones, it is common for different people, who may or may not know each other, to attend the same event and take pictures and videos from different spatial or personal perspectives. Within the realm of social media, it is desirable to enable these people to share their pictures and videos in order to enrich memories and facilitate social networking. However, it is cumbersome to manually manage these photos from different cameras, of which the clocks settings are often not calibrated. In this paper, we propose an automatic algorithm to accurately align different photo streams or sequences from different photographers for the same event in chronological order on a common timeline, while respecting the time constraints within each photo stream. Given the preferred similarity measure (e.g., visual, temporal, and spatial similarities), our algorithm performs photo stream alignment via matching on a sparse representation graph that forces the data connections to be sparse in a explicit fashion. We evaluate our algorithm on real-world personal online albums for thirty-six events and demonstrate its efficacy in automatically facilitating collaborative photo collection and sharing.