V-Share
Amirali Charania, Bharat Ravisekar
{amiralic, rbharat}@cc.gatech.edu
Abstract
In the present day world, people are increasingly using their camera-enabled
mobile phones to take photographs of places they visit. However, it is difficult
to organize, navigate and share such huge collection of photographs without
tagging proper context with them. We feel that if we associate spatial,
temporal and user based contextual tags with such photographs, then they
can be managed and shared better. We further foresee a number of exciting
applications like Interactive Albums and Collaborative Tourism using such a
system. The focus of this project is on implementing a simple prototype
system to demonstrate the viability of the idea. This document is to serve as
the project proposal.
Motivation and Objectives
With the popularization of digital photography and the availability of affordable
mobile devices having in-built cameras, people are now capturing and storing far
more photographs than ever before. These large collections of photographs are
inherently difficult to organize, navigate and share. The problem seems to arise from
the intrinsic distributed-ness of these large collections and the lack of proper
photographic context of these photographs. Yet, viewing and sharing such collections
has a broad social and practical importance. The problem seems even more trying if
we consider that the context of the photographs are in fact readily available in the
form of GPS location, system time etc. In this project, we are planning to combine
spatial, temporal and manually entered text tags with photographs to automate the
tasks of organization, management and sharing of photographs among social
networks. Building on this basic idea, we foresee the following interesting
applications:
1. Interactive Album: Typically, when we download photographs from mobile
devices to our PC, we store them as files in a folder without any context. Instead,
if we place the photographs on a map, then it would add to the experience of
viewing the collection. We could even share such maps among friends and social
networks.
2. Collaborative Tourism: While planning a trip to an unknown place, we typically
refer standard tourism guides and websites. However, these are often the places
of general interest, which might not be relevant to the interests of a particular
user. Suppose we have a social network of users with similar interests who share
their travel experiences via geo-tagged photos. Then, we could access to
information on “interesting” places like their location, photographs, detailed
account of personal experience, most conducive times to visit etc from the
system and be able to make a customized plan based on places that interest us.
Objective: In this project, we plan to build a prototype of our idea and if possible
deploy it on a java-enabled mobile phone that has a camera phone and GPS
receiver.
Related work
Geo-tagging has been used before for applications that organize images for better
exploration. Kentaro Toyama et. al. have used geo-tagging images for creating an
indexed database of images and built an browsable application on top of it for easy
navigation. Alexandar Jaffe et. al. have devised an algorithm to summarize and rank
photographs based on their geo-tagging and other features to select best
representative photographs. Our system would be an end-to-end application that
spans the whole cycle: right from the moment a photograph is captured via a
camera, to automatically tagging it and synchronizing it with the central repository to
planning a trip. Besides, we plan to group users based on their social networks and
interest groups for sharing pictures.
Proposed work
Steps:
1. Tagging of photographs:
a. Location tag: The location tag (GPS coordinates) will be obtained using
location-based APIs (JSR179) on a J2ME phone with a GPS receiver. We
would append this location with the image header. An alternate option we
might consider is to use a .NET CF instead of J2ME phones.
b. Temporal tag: The temporal tag (date and time) will be obtained from the
system as well as from the GPS satellites. We would append this with the
image header.
c. Manual tag: The manually entered text tag would be used by users to input
their personal experiences and the semantic location information about the
photograph. We will add this with the image header.
2.
Storing of photographs: The photographs to be shared will be stored on a
centralized database system exposed through a web-service. This would be done
using a mobile client application which would communicate with the server side
web services (.NET web services). The authentication of users would be based
on a mapping stored on the server that maps the user to the groups to which he
belongs.
3. Browsing of photographs: The photographs stored on the centralized database
system will be browsed using maps as an interface. This would be a client side
desktop application that uses map-point APIs to fetch the maps and web services
to access the centralized database of photographs. The authentication of users
would be based on a mapping stored on the server that maps the user to the
groups to which he belongs.
4. Sharing the photographs: The user can download tagged photographs taken
by other members of his group onto a mobile phone for on-tour reference. This
would be a mobile client service using the .NET web services. The authentication
of users would be based on a mapping stored on the server that maps the user to
the groups to which he belongs.
System Architecture:
Plan of Action
We intend to use the following technologies:
1. J2ME emulator WTK 2.5 - We would use J2ME emulator WTK 2.5 for
developing our mobile client applications.
2. .NET – We would use Visual Studio .NET 2005 for developing web services
and desktop client application in C#.
3. XML – We would use XML based data storage at the central image repository.
4. Map point– We intend to use Microsoft MapPoint web service for fetching the
maps.
Time Line
The timeline that we intend to follow for this project is:
Task
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
Detailed Design
Implementing the mobile client application on the emulator
Implementing the server side application
Implementing the desktop client application for browsing
Evaluation and testing
weeks
2
2
2
2
2
Evaluation and Testing Method
Our system will require two client side applications and 1 server side application. We
do not intend to implement the voice to text converter module for voice tags,
Bluetooth synchronization module for synchronization, both of these would need far
more work. Due to lack of hardware at this moment, we intend to demonstrate our
system on an emulator.
The evaluation should be based on how well we would have managed to achieve:
1. Tagging of photos with the spatial, temporal and user-entered tags.
2. Synchronization of the photos with the server.
3. Managing and organizing photos
4. Browsing of photos using maps
5. Downloading and viewing of the information for later reference while on tour
Future Work
1. Tagging of photographs: Voice can be used as audio tags. These can replace
manual tags which can be pain for the user on a mobile device.
2. Sharing of photographs: As per current system the sharing is done using
shared centralized server over GPRS network but this can also be implemented
using Bluetooth technology. The Bluetooth technology has a limitation of distance
but advantage of peer to peer sharing. We foresee our application to be used on
Parlay OSA framework and SIP protocol where it would be possible for peer to
peer sharing of photographs over mobile phones using dynamic IP’s. Thus there
would be no limitation of distance and advantage of peer to peer sharing as well.
The Parlay OSA framework is already implemented in parts of Europe and ASIA.
Bibliography
1. Alexander Jaffe, Mor Naaman, Tamir Tassa and Marc Davis - Generating
summaries for large collections of geo-referenced photographs, WWW '06:
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web year =
2006, isbn = 1-59593-323-9,pp 853-854, ACM Press
2. Kentaro Toyama, Ron Logan, Asta Roseway - Geographic Location Tags on
Digital Images, Microsoft Research