WonderWhat: real-time event determination from photos

How often did you feel disappointed in a foreign country, when you had been craving for participating in authentic native events but miserably ended up with being lost in the crowd, due to ignorance of the local culture? Have you ever imagined that with merely a simple click, a tool can identify the events that are right in front of you? As a step in this direction, in this paper, we propose a system that provides users with information of the public events that they are attending by analyzing in real time their photos taken at the event, leveraging both spatio-temporal context and photo content. To fulfill the task, we designed the system to collect event information, maintain dedicated event database, build photo content model for event types, and rank the final results. Extensive experiments were conducted to prove the effectiveness of each component.