Automatic summarization for personal digital photos

With the rapid development and wide spread of digital cameras, sizable personal digital image libraries would become mainstay of our digital assets for recording pictorial memories in our lives. As a matter of fact, most consumers cannot afford the time to annotate and organize their personal digital photos, they would face genuine problem of accessing them effectively and efficiently. More often than not, consumers wish to share a selective summary of their images with their relatives and friends, increasingly using remote repository services and messaging services (emails, multimedia message service). In this paper, we address this issue with automatic organization based on analysis of time stamps and image content to facilitate browsing and summarization of personal digital photos. In particular, both photo creation time and image content are exploited to efficiently partition related images in two stages. From the partitions, key photos are selected to represent the partition based on content analysis and then collated to generate a summary, which can be enjoyed as a slide show for visual communication. We demonstrate our approach on genuine heterogeneous personal digital photos with encouraging results. We also develop a photo summarization application with multimedia message service on Nokia 7650 camera phone emulator.