VirtualTour: an online travel assistant based on high quality images

  • Authors:

  • Feng Jing;Lei Zhang;Wei-Ying Ma

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • MULTIMEDIA '06 Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

With the popularity of both travel and Web, more and more people use online travel services to facilitate their travel activities or share their travel experiences. Considering that existing services emphasize more on the textual content with the pictorial content only as supplement, we propose the VirtualTour system. It is an online travel service dedicated on high quality images, which helps travelers plan their trip. The images of VirtualTour are from photo forum sites. They have rich and accurate metadata which could be used to extract geographic location information of them and assess the quality of them. A representative sights identification algorithm is also proposed to automatically identify the possible related sights of a region. Based on the map services that seamlessly integrated into the system, a wieldy UI is designed to support several useful features, e.g. query by map, location or path.