Automatic Text Searching For Personal Photos

This demonstration presents the MediAssist prototype system for organisation of personal digital photo collections based on contextual information, such as time and location of image capture, and content-based analysis, such as face detection and recognition. This metadata is used directly for identification of photos which match specified attributes, and also to create text surrogates for photos, allowing for text-based queries of photo collections without relying on manual annotation. MediAssist illustrates our research into digital photo management, showing how a combination of automatically extracted context and content-based information, together with user annotation and traditional text indexing techniques, facilitates efficient searching of personal photo collections.