Foto2Events: From Photos to Event Discovery and Linking in Online Social Networks

Online social networking has become the predominant activity in the digital world thanks to multimedia data (mainly photos) sharing (e.g., photos now represent 93% of the top posts on Facebook). Discovering events where users are involved using their own posts and those shared by their friends would be of great importance. In this paper, we address this issue by providing an original approach able to detect, enrich and also link user's events using photos shared within his online social networks. Using metadata, our approach provides a multidimensional gathering of similar photos using their temporal, geographical, and social facets. To validate our approach, we implemented a prototype called Foto2Events and conducted a set of experiments on real and generated data. Results show that our approach works well for various metadata distributions.