Collective Photography

This paper offers the reader an insight into how photography and home video production could evolve in the near future through the evolution of geo-tagging (adding location and orientation parameters to an object). Technological advances in portable imaging and communications devices, e.g. digital cameras and smartphones, are bringing about a new era in media creation that could see us all automatically contributing to the documentation of society. We will demonstrate how enriched multimedia can be generated through the exploitation of socially generated spatiotemporal knowledge, extracted from the photos of others, or from any form of geo-referenced material. An overview of how geo-tags can be created is presented, ranging from integrated hardware to purely software solutions; we focus on a selection of promising cutting edge research projects in this field that aim to fully automate the geo-tagging process. Finally, we will propose ways to extract content and visualise geo-referenced material intelligently inside registered imagery using geographical reasoning.