Where Would You Go on Your Next Vacation? A Framework for Visual Exploration of Attractive Places

Tourists face a great challenge when they gather information about places they want to visit. Geographically tagged information in the form of Wikipedia pages, local tourist information pages, dedicated web sites and the massive amount of information provided by Google Earth is publicly available and commonly used. But the processing of this information involves a time consuming activity. Our goal is to make search for attractive places simpler for the common user and provide researchers with methods for exploration and analysis of attractive areas. We assume that an attractive place is characterized by large amounts of photos taken by many people. This paper presents a framework in which we demonstrate a systematic approach for visualization and exploration of attractive places as a zoom able information layer. The presented technique utilizes density-based clustering of image coordinates and smart color scaling to produce an interactive visualizations using Google Earth Mash up. We show that our approach can be used as a basis for detailed analysis of attractive areas. In order to demonstrate our method, we use real-world geo-tagged photo data obtained from Flickr and Panoramio to construct interactive visualizations of virtually every region of interest in the world.