Event Recognition in Photo Collections with a Stopwatch HMM

The task of recognizing events in photo collections is central for automatically organizing images. It is also very challenging, because of the ambiguity of photos across different event classes and because many photos do not convey enough relevant information. Unfortunately, the field still lacks standard evaluation data sets to allow comparison of different approaches. In this paper, we introduce and release a novel data set of personal photo collections containing more than 61,000 images in 807 collections, annotated with 14 diverse social event classes. Casting collections as sequential data, we build upon recent and state-of-the-art work in event recognition in videos to propose a latent sub-event approach for event recognition in photo collections. However, photos in collections are sparsely sampled over time and come in bursts from which transpires the importance of specific moments for the photographers. Thus, we adapt a discriminative hidden Markov model to allow the transitions between states to be a function of the time gap between consecutive images, which we coin as Stopwatch Hidden Markov model (SHMM). In our experiments, we show that our proposed model outperforms approaches based only on feature pooling or a classical hidden Markov model. With an average accuracy of 56%, we also highlight the difficulty of the data set and the need for future advances in event recognition in photo collections.