Consumer image retrieval by estimating relation tree from family photo collections

In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically estimate relationship among people in a family image collection based on results from face analyses technologies including automated face recognition and clustering, demographic assessment, and face similarity measurement, as well as contextual information such as people co-appearance, people's relative positions in photos and image timestamps. As the result, a relation tree can be estimated which provides important semantic information regarding people involved in a photo collection and has numerous applications in photo sharing and browsing, social networking, etc. The methods for deriving and integrating information from photos and the process for estimating a relation tree are described. Experimental results on two typical consumer photo collections and examples of using these results in consumer image retrieval are presented.