Content-based photo album management using faces' arrangement

Photo album management, an application of content-based image browsing/retrieval, has attracted much attention in recent years. Identities of individuals appearing in photos are the most important aspect of photo browsing. However, face recognition generally does not work effectively in such situations due to the large variations in pose, illumination and sometimes poor quality of images. We present a system for browsing photo albums. The system automatically detects and stores information about the locations of faces in the photos. A similarity function based on face arrangement is defined. Photos are then clustered based on the similarity function using a proposed clustering algorithm. The system also represents photos of an event using a composite image. The composite image is built from representative faces and an image that represents the event. Experiments indicate that the face arrangement features are effective in representing the semantic content of the photos and are appropriate for photo albums.