What Makes Photo Cultures Different?

Billions of photos shared online today are created by people with different socio-economic characteristics living in different locations. We introduce a number of methods for quantifying the differences between such "photo cultures" and apply them to a large collection of Instagram images shared in five mega-cities around the world. First, we extract image content and style features and use them to design a new visualization technique for qualitative analysis of photo cultures. We then use supervised learning to automatically recognize and compare visual activity at different locations and expose surprising connections between geographically distant photo cultures. Finally, we perform a low-level quantitative analysis to understand what makes photo cultures different from each other.

[1]  Rossano Schifanella,et al.  An Image Is Worth More than a Thousand Favorites: Surfacing the Hidden Beauty of Flickr Pictures , 2015, ICWSM.

[2]  James Ze Wang,et al.  Studying Aesthetics in Photographic Images Using a Computational Approach , 2006, ECCV.

[3]  Alexei A. Efros,et al.  What makes Paris look like Paris? , 2015, Commun. ACM.

[4]  Virgílio A. F. Almeida,et al.  The impact of visual attributes on online image diffusion , 2014, WebSci '14.

[5]  Jan Sahli.  Intermediale Forschung Zwischen film-und Kunstwissenschaft : Zu Läszlö Moholy-Nagys Filmwerk und Theorie , 2006 .

[6]  Bolei Zhou,et al.  Recognizing City Identity via Attribute Analysis of Geo-tagged Images , 2014, ECCV.

[7]  Subbarao Kambhampati,et al.  What We Instagram: A First Analysis of Instagram Photo Content and User Types , 2014, ICWSM.

[8]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  Visualizing Data using t-SNE , 2008 .

[9]  Lorenzo Porzi,et al.  Predicting and Understanding Urban Perception with Convolutional Neural Networks , 2015, ACM Multimedia.

[10]  M.,et al.  Statistical and Structural Approaches to Texture , 2022 .

[11]  Lena Christolova.  Jan Sahli: Filmische Sinneserweiterung. László Moholy-Nagys Filmwerk und Theorie , 2007 .

[12]  Henriette Cramer,et al.  Aesthetic capital: what makes london look beautiful, quiet, and happy? , 2014, CSCW.

[13]  Allan Hanbury,et al.  Affective image classification using features inspired by psychology and art theory , 2010, ACM Multimedia.

[14]  Eric Gilbert,et al.  Faces engage us: photos with faces attract more likes and comments on Instagram , 2014, CHI.