I know what you did last summer! - privacy-aware image classification and search
Sergej Zerr, Stefan Siersdorfer, Jonathon S. Hare, Elena Demidova · ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) · 2012
Modern content sharing environments such as Flickr or YouTube contain a large amount of private resources such as photos showing weddings, family holidays, and private parties. These resources can be of a highly sensitive na-ture, disclosing many details of the users ’ private sphere. In order to support users in making privacy decisions in the context of image sharing and to provide them with a better overview on privacy related visual content available on the Web, we propose techniques to automatically detect private images, and to enable privacy-oriented image search. To this end, we learn privacy classifiers trained on a large set of manually assessed Flickr photos, combining textual meta-data of images with a variety of visual features. We employ the resulting classification models for specifically searching for private photos, and for diversifying query results to pro-vide users with a better coverage of private and public con-tent. Large-scale classification experiments reveal insights into the predictive performance of different visual and tex-tual features, and a user evaluation of query result rankings demonstrates the viability of our approach.