A ubiquitous photo mapping considering users' lines of sight

This paper proposes a new framework for mapping and retrieving photographs, maps and cyberspaces to each other. Our target photographs are enhanced with spatial metadata such as geographic coordinates where they were taken and directions where they focused on. We assume photographs having such spatial metadata become popular. In a common framework, such photographs are mapped to their viewpoints by using their location information generated by GPS. We think this framework has less function for practical spatial queries. For example, even if a photograph is mapped to a certain point on a map, a scene of the point may not be shown in the photograph. It may show a different direction than user wants to see. A problem is that though locations or objects shown in photographs are important for users, viewpoints are not positions of them but positions of cameras from which photographs were taken. We therefore map each photograph to a vector from its viewpoint to its gazing point, and named the vector as photo vector. A prototype system based on our framework provides functions such as handling advanced spatial queries for retrieving photographs, visualizing how many photographs show each location, and mapping text labels having URLs and geographic coordinates to the appropriate positions on photographs. In this framework, photographs, maps and cyberspaces are mapped to each other.