Argo: intelligent advertising made possible from users' photos

Though monetizing user-generated photos has a great potential in image business, this topic is seldom touched due to the difficulties of both image understanding and ads-to-images vocabulary matching. In this technical demonstration, we show case the Argo system, which attempts to monetize UGC (user-generated content) photos by mining a user's interest from a group of his photos and advertising the photos accordingly. Given a page of photos, it first auto-tags each photo by a large-scale search-based image annotation method, then maps both image annotations and the textual descriptions of ads onto an ODP-based topic hierarchy. The mapping produces semantic features which are statistical distributions on ODP topics. Ads are ranked by their similarities to such topic distributions of the photos and the top-ranked ones are output.