Proceedings Article | 7 February 2011
KEYWORDS: Social networks, Web 2.0 technologies, Web services, Visualization, Expectation maximization algorithms, Genetic algorithms, Human-machine interfaces, Multimedia, Feature extraction, Information technology
Recently, we observed a substantial increase in the users' interest in sharing their photos online in travel blogs,
social communities and photo sharing websites. An interesting aspect of these web platforms is their high
level of user-media interaction and thus a high-quality source of semantic annotations: Users comment on the
photos of each others, add external links to their travel blogs, tag each other in the social communities and
add captions and descriptions to their photos. However, while those media assets are shared online, many users
still highly appreciate the representation of these media in appealing physical photo books where the semantics
are represented in form of descriptive text, maps, and external elements in addition to their related photos.
Thus, in this paper we aim at fulfilling this need and provide an approach for creating photo books from Web
2.0 resources. We concentrate on two kinds of online shared media as resources for printable photo books:
(a) Blogs especially travel blogs (b) Social community websites like Facebook which witness a rapidly growing
number of shared media elements including photos. We introduce an approach to select media elements including
photos, geographical maps and texts from both blogs and social networks semi-automatically, and then use these
elements to create a printable photo book with an appealing layout. Because the selected media elements can
be too many for the resulting book, we choose the most proper ones by exploiting content based, social based,
and interactive based criteria. Additionally we add external media elements such as geographical maps, texts
and externally hosted photos from linked resources. Having selected the important media, our approach uses a
genetic algorithm to create an appealing layout using aesthetical rules, such as positioning the photo with the
related text or map in a way that respects the golden ratio and symmetry. Distributing the media over the pages
is done by optimizing the distribution according to several rules such that no pages with purely textual elements
without photos are produced. For the page layout appropriate photos are chosen for the background based on
their salience. Other media assets, such as texts, photos and geographical maps are positioned in the foreground
by a dynamic page layout algorithm respecting both the content of the photos and the background, and common
rules for visual layout. The result of our system is a photo book in a printable format. We implemented our
approach as web services that analyze the media elements, enrich them, and create the layout in order to finally
publish a photo book. The connection to those services is implemented in two interfaces. The first is a tool to
select entries from personal blogs, and the second is a Facebook application that allows the user to select photos
from his albums.
