MetaXa - Context- and Content-Driven Metadata Enhancement for Personal Photo Books

Making a photo book as a special gift to your beloved can be very time-consuming. One has to carefully select and arrange the pictures nicely over the pages of a previously bought photo book. In these days, photo finisher companies are able to directly print and bind a nice photo book from a selected set of images. But for the users of the software that comes with the album creation, the selection and arrangement of pictures in the album still remains a tedious task. What is missing are easy and good suggestions which pictures to select and how to arrange them into a personal photo book. A higher availability of metadata with the pictures could enable a content-driven and context-driven selection and make album creation better and easier. With MetaXa, we propose a flexible, component-based software architecture that iteratively allows for the multimodal extraction and enhancement of metadata for personal media content. The enhancement process is realized by extraction and enhancement components that each contribute to a well-defined annotation task. Depending on the application domain different components can be configured into a specific instance. With MetaXa, it is hence easy to reuse certain annotation algorithms in different scenarios and to alter a setup by adding or replacing certain enhancement components. MetaXa has been applied to the domain of photo book creation by our project partner CeWe Color and evaluated on a large set of consumer photos.