Social game epitome versus automatic visual analysis

With the rapid growth of digital photography, sharing of photos with friends and family has become very popular. When people share their photos, they usually organize them in albums according to events or places. To tell the story of some important events in one's life, it is desirable to have an efficient summarization tool which can help people to get a quick overview of an album containing huge number of photos. In this paper, we analyze an approach for photo album summarization through a novel social game “Epitome” as a Facebook application. This social game can collect research data and, at the same time, it provides a collage or a cover photo of the user's photo album, while, at the same time, the user enjoys playing the game. As a benchmark comparison to this game, we performed automatic visual analysis considering several state-of-the-art features.