Investigating Summarization Techniques for Geo-Tagged Image Indexing

Images with geo-tagging information are increasingly available on the Web. However, such images need to be annotated with additional textual information if they are to be retrievable, since users do not search by geo-coordinates. We propose to automatically generate such textual information by (1) generating toponyms from the geo-tagging information (2) retrieving Web documents using toponyms as queries (3) summarizing the retrieved documents. The summaries are then used to index the images. In this paper we investigate how various summarization techniques affect image retrieval performance and show significant improvements can be obtained when using the summaries for indexing.