Learning to Select and Order Vacation Photographs

We propose the problem of automated photo album creation from an unordered image collection. The problem is difficult as it involves a number of complex perceptual tasks that facilitate selection and ordering of photos to create a compelling visual narrative. To help solve this problem, we collect (and will make available) a new benchmark dataset based on Flickr images. Flickr Album Dataset and provides a variety of annotations useful for the task, including manually created albums of various lengths. We analyze the problem and provide experimental evidence, through user studies, that both selection and ordering of photos within an album is important for human observers. To capture and learn rules of album composition, we propose a discriminative structured model capable of encoding simple preferences for contextual layout of the scene (e.g., spatial layout of faces, global scene context, and presence/absence of attributes) and ordering between photos (e.g., exclusion principles or correlations). The parameters of the model are learned using a structured SVM framework. Once learned, the model allows automatic composition of photo albums from unordered and untagged collections of images. We quantitatively evaluate the results obtained using our model against manually created albums and baselines on a dataset of 63 personal photo collections from 5 different topics.