PicTouRe - A Picture-Based Tourism Recommender

We present PicTouRe – a picture-based tourism recommender. PicTouRe aims to mitigate people’s difficulties in explicitly expressing their touristic preferences, which is even more challenging in the initial phase of travel decision making. Addressing this issue, with PicTouRe we follow the idiom “a picture is worth a thousand words” and use pictures as a tool to implicitly elicit peoples’ touristic preferences. We describe the core concept of PicTouRe - the Generic Profiler, which in essence determines an explainable vector representation, i.e., touristic profile, given any picture collection as input. We showcase a user’s journey through PicTouRe and describe the steps behind. Finally, we present results of a first user study supporting our approach. PicTouRe is available under https://pictoprof.ec.tuwien.ac.at and a demo video under https://youtu.be/xZnXLPcenEs.

[1]  A. Tellegen,et al.  PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES An Alternative "Description of Personality": The Big-Five Factor Structure , 2022 .

[2]  Hannes Werthner,et al.  Information Technology and Tourism — A Challenging Relationship , 1999 .

[3]  Pip Forer,et al.  Information Technology and Tourism: A Challenging Relationship , 2002 .

[4]  Heather Gibson,et al.  Tourist roles: Needs and the Lifecourse , 2002 .

[5]  Francesco Ricci,et al.  E-commerce and tourism , 2004, CACM.

[6]  Andreas H. Zins,et al.  Exploring Travel Information Search Behavior Beyond Common Frontiers , 2007, J. Inf. Technol. Tour..

[7]  Hannes Werthner,et al.  Eliciting the users' unknown preferences , 2014, RecSys '14.

[8]  Hannes Werthner,et al.  A picture-based approach to recommender systems , 2014, Information Technology & Tourism.

[9]  Bruce Ferwerda,et al.  Predicting Personality Traits with Instagram Pictures , 2015, EMPIRE@RecSys.

[10]  Bruce Ferwerda,et al.  Predicting Users' Personality from Instagram Pictures: Using Visual and/or Content Features? , 2018, UMAP.

[11]  Nélio Cacho,et al.  From Photos to Travel Itinerary: A Tourism Recommender System for Smart Tourism Destination , 2018, 2018 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Big Data Computing Service and Applications (BigDataService).

[12]  Hannes Werthner,et al.  What is the “Personality” of a tourism destination? , 2018, Information Technology & Tourism.

[13]  Hannes Werthner,et al.  From Pictures to Travel Characteristics: Deep Learning-Based Profiling of Tourists and Tourism Destinations , 2019 .

[14]  Hannes Werthner,et al.  Eliciting Touristic Profiles: A User Study on Picture Collections , 2020, UMAP.