Study on Situation-oriented Classification of Sightseeing Images Based on Visual and Metadata Features

This thesis proposes a method for classifying sightseeing images into different situations based on their visual and metadata features. The widespread use of digital cameras and smart phones has brought about a situation where tourists take lots of photos of memorable moments during their travels and upload these photos to web albums such as Flickr or Picasa. These sightseeing images then become useful resources for others who plan to visit the places shown in the images. As scenes of sightseeing spots vary from situation to situation, the impression one gets from viewing these images depends heavily on conditions such as the weather and season. If a web-based tourist service could provide tourists with different views of sightseeing spots in various situations, visitors would be able to plan their vacations by looking at the views they enjoy. That is, such a service would be useful for tourists to plan when and where to visit. To achieve this goal, a method that can classify various sightseeing images into various situations is required. Although image classification / annotation using visual and text features is becoming a major research topic in various fields, such as information retrieval and web intelligence, image classification methods focusing on various situations have not been studied yet. One of the contributions of this thesis is to consider various situations and organize them in terms of their characteristics. The situations treated in this thesis are classified into weather-related, time-related, and season-related ones. Weather-related situations include sunshiny and cloudy situations, and color features of sky regions are expected to be effective as a means of classifying them. On the other hand, time-related situations are characterized as certain times of the day such as sunrise/sunset, daytime, and night-time. Therefore, shooting date and time, i.e., metadata attached to the photos, are important features for such a classification. Different from weather-related and time-related situations, scenery change by season will depend on the characteristics of a sightseeing spot. It may happen that even though two sightseeing spots are geographically close, one maybe season-dependent and the other not. Therefore, sightseeing spots should also be classified into season-dependent and season-independent as a preprocessing for image classification. This thesis proposes different classification methods for each of these situation types. The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 describes the background and motivation. The vast amount of sightseeing images available in the web albums is an important resource for tourists. The purpose of this thesis is to establish an efficient image classification method targeting sightseeing images showing various situations, which will add extra value to existing web-based tourist services. The related topics of the thesis, i.e., image classification / annotation, have attracted a lot of research, and various features and integration methods have been studied. However, the major focus of these studies has been general-purpose processing; methods focusing on various situations have not been studied yet. This chapter defines and organizes the situations to be handled in the thesis and discusses the challenges of classifying sightseeing images into each situation. Chapter 2 describes the existing applications of tourism informatics. Image classification and annotation methods based on supervised and unsupervised learning with various features are also covered as related work. Chapter 3 describes content-based image classification targeting weather-related and time-related situations. Visual features for identifying each target situation are considered from viewpoints such as composition of the photos and typical colors in each situation. The images are classified in a hierarchical manner, in each stage of which efficient color features, region of interests (ROI), and cluster identification method are determined. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain clusters for each situation with high precision and recall. Chapter 4 focuses on time-related situations and extends the content-based image classification method proposed in Chapter 3 by introducing filtering based on tag information. By using timestamps attached to images, clusters for the situations obtained by the content-based approach are verified to increase the accuracy of the classification. The time windows are adjusted by considering the geolocation of sightseeing spots, and this adjustment is based on information obtained from the Web. Experimental results show that this method can improve precision while maintaining recall in most cases. Chapter 5 focuses on season-related situations and proposes a method for classifying sightseeing spots into season-dependent and season-independent ones as preprocessing for image classification. If image processing is required in order to extract features from photos, the network load for downloading photos and the cost of image processing become a serious problem. To solve this problem, the statistical features of sightseeing spots calculated using metadata are proposed. Image processing is only applied to the spots classified as season-dependent by machine learning with the statistical features. Experimental results show that this method can classify actual sightseeing spots with high precision and recall. Chapter 6 summarizes the conclusions presented in Chapter 3 to Chapter 5. This thesis proposes three kinds of image classification methods, each of which employs efficient visual and metadata features and integration methods for the target situations. The results of this thesis are meant to contribute to tourism and related applications, which are important issues in many cities including Tokyo. As the volume of images and metadata available on the Web is still increasing at a rapid rate, the contributions of the thesis may have numerous other applications.首都大学東京, 2013-09-30, 博士(工学), 甲第437号首都大学東

Enhancing travel experience with the combination of information visualization, situation awareness, and distributed cognition

With the new forms of travel introduced by new technologies of transportation and communication, a satisfied travel experience could be affected by various factors before and during a trip. Especially for road trips, traveling by car provides freedom on time control while leading to more possibilities of rescheduling initial plans made under time constraints. When overwhelmed with the need for changed travel context to avoid unexpected events that will require a serious change of initial plans, travelers need to find and access helpful contextual information quickly. This is a context-related decision making process that requires amplifying human situation awareness and supporting distributed cognition, since travel information offers multiple choices. To solve this problem, I applied information visualization as the main design solution. When comparing it with a traditional representation of lists, information visualization displays the advantages of visual representation of abstract data to clarify and depict the information and amplify cognition while improving travel experience intuitively in the domain of user experience design. Therefore in this thesis I will address the approach of implementing recontextualized situation awareness, distributed cognition, and information visualization in a travel-aid system. By using both theoretical and practical design perspectives, I will discuss how to enhance travel experience with represented contextual information that users desire or expect before and during a road trip. I will also explore the new values of this design with strategic business support. Additionally, after conducting research and analysis on existing interaction design parts, I selected a smartphone app to serve as a proper platform with connected multifunctions. Briefly, I begin the thesis with a review of previous theories and aspects of travel planning, information visualization as it relates to travel, situation awareness, and distributed cognition in the design context and related smartphone apps. Then I discuss the process of identifying the specific issues to be solved or improved with a preliminary research of empirical study, followed by an interview, online survey, insights synthesis, and business model design. After a visual-system design was developed, heuristic evaluation was employed to assess the outcome. Lastly, a new round of refined design results is introduced based on outcomes of the evaluation

Landscape and Tourism, Landscapes of Tourism

Landscape is central to tourism. It is key to the development, marketing/promotion, and consumption of tourism destinations, to triggering and sustaining tourism markets, and to enticing tourist dreams, fantasies, and behaviors. From ‘sight-seeing’ practices—at the basis of all tourism activities—landscape figures prominently all the way to the overall spatial planning and management of a destination for tourism development. The intertwined relationship between tourism and landscape comes with a series of costs and benefits, in the context of tourism landscapes. Landscapes of tourism reflect and stage recreational trends, multifunctional livelihood systems, conflicts and opportunities for employment and income generation, as well as human, cultural, and natural resource management and use. This Special Issue aims to enhance the interdisciplinary scientific dialogue on these issues and challenges, while highlighting their range and significance for tourism and the landscape, in terms of theory, empirical practice, approach, policy, ethics, and future prospects. Some of the questions posed for consideration here are: What are landscapes of tourism, for whom and how/why? What is the role of the landscape in tourism promotion, attraction, and experience? How does tourism affect the landscape? What lessons do the history and geography of tourism have to offer to tourism landscape stewardship? How may we best plan for and manage the landscape in the context of various forms of tourism growth and spread, at various scales? Scholarly advances in the past few decades have steadily built on a diverse—but spread-out and not adequately connected—bibliographical basis for future research. Much remains to be understood and exchanged as landscape and tourism—two highly complex and multifaceted scientific areas—come together in the scope of this Special Issue in a variety of ways across time, space, and culture

Exploratory Browsing

In recent years the digital media has influenced many areas of our life. The transition from analogue to digital has substantially changed our ways of dealing with media collections. Today‟s interfaces for managing digital media mainly offer fixed linear models corresponding to the underlying technical concepts (folders, events, albums, etc.), or the metaphors borrowed from the analogue counterparts (e.g., stacks, film rolls). However, people‟s mental interpretations of their media collections often go beyond the scope of linear scan. Besides explicit search with specific goals, current interfaces can not sufficiently support the explorative and often non-linear behavior. This dissertation presents an exploration of interface design to enhance the browsing experience with media collections. The main outcome of this thesis is a new model of Exploratory Browsing to guide the design of interfaces to support the full range of browsing activities, especially the Exploratory Browsing. We define Exploratory Browsing as the behavior when the user is uncertain about her or his targets and needs to discover areas of interest (exploratory), in which she or he can explore in detail and possibly find some acceptable items (browsing). According to the browsing objectives, we group browsing activities into three categories: Search Browsing, General Purpose Browsing and Serendipitous Browsing. In the context of this thesis, Exploratory Browsing refers to the latter two browsing activities, which goes beyond explicit search with specific objectives. We systematically explore the design space of interfaces to support the Exploratory Browsing experience. Applying the methodology of User-Centered Design, we develop eight prototypes, covering two main usage contexts of browsing with personal collections and in online communities. The main studied media types are photographs and music. The main contribution of this thesis lies in deepening the understanding of how people‟s exploratory behavior has an impact on the interface design. This thesis contributes to the field of interface design for media collections in several aspects. With the goal to inform the interface design to support the Exploratory Browsing experience with media collections, we present a model of Exploratory Browsing, covering the full range of exploratory activities around media collections. We investigate this model in different usage contexts and develop eight prototypes. The substantial implications gathered during the development and evaluation of these prototypes inform the further refinement of our model: We uncover the underlying transitional relations between browsing activities and discover several stimulators to encourage a fluid and effective activity transition. Based on this model, we propose a catalogue of general interface characteristics, and employ this catalogue as criteria to analyze the effectiveness of our prototypes. We also present several general suggestions for designing interfaces for media collections

Advances in Computer Science and Engineering

The book Advances in Computer Science and Engineering constitutes the revised selection of 23 chapters written by scientists and researchers from all over the world. The chapters cover topics in the scientific fields of Applied Computing Techniques, Innovations in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Applications and Advances in Applied Modeling

Recentering the Cartographies of Karate : Martial Arts Tourism in Okinawa

Background. Since the beginning of the 2010s, the Okinawan Government has been making significant efforts to develop, professionalize, and promote karate tourism in Okinawa, since this is known to be an essential sector for the island's economy. Problem and aim. A systematized study into the nature of karate tourism in Okinawa has so far not been conducted. This article offers a comprehensive overview of the historical development of martial arts tourism in Okinawa, by discussing the most recent events in karate as a martial arts tourism niche and its ongoing institutionalization. Method. The method of research presents and analyses a corpus of institutional and public sources of information on karate tourism available through the web. It should be noted that web presence is one of the leading action methods for the Japanese and Okinawan governments, and hence it supplies a valuable resource of information, particularly considering the lack of specific scholarly references on the matter. The article incorporates academic literature on martial arts tourism and other relevant types of sports and cultural tourism, as well as a body of work on Japanese and Okinawan studies examining the subject. Results. The creation of an official karate tourism industry in Okinawa responds to Japan's economic and cultural plans for attracting higher numbers of tourists to the country, thus increasing overall revenues and fostering regional revitalization. However, Okinawan karate as a martial art and tourism sector is also conditioned by powerful global and transnational factors superimposed onto local interests and narratives. Conclusions. Karate tourism is being actively promoted by the Japanese Government and the Okinawan Prefectural Government as a form of martial arts tourism intermingling cultural and sporting factors. Despite this convergence of economic objectives, hierarchical tensions exist as the Okinawan and mainland definitions of traditional karate and its cultural significance differ, forcing a debate on the current touristic institutionalization process for karate

Social and Semantic Contexts in Tourist Mobile Applications

The ongoing growth of the World Wide Web along with the increase possibility of access information through a variety of devices in mobility, has defi nitely changed the way users acquire, create, and personalize information, pushing innovative strategies for annotating and organizing it. In this scenario, Social Annotation Systems have quickly gained a huge popularity, introducing millions of metadata on di fferent Web resources following a bottom-up approach, generating free and democratic mechanisms of classi cation, namely folksonomies. Moving away from hierarchical classi cation schemas, folksonomies represent also a meaningful mean for identifying similarities among users, resources and tags. At any rate, they suff er from several limitations, such as the lack of specialized tools devoted to manage, modify, customize and visualize them as well as the lack of an explicit semantic, making di fficult for users to bene fit from them eff ectively. Despite appealing promises of Semantic Web technologies, which were intended to explicitly formalize the knowledge within a particular domain in a top-down manner, in order to perform intelligent integration and reasoning on it, they are still far from reach their objectives, due to di fficulties in knowledge acquisition and annotation bottleneck. The main contribution of this dissertation consists in modeling a novel conceptual framework that exploits both social and semantic contextual dimensions, focusing on the domain of tourism and cultural heritage. The primary aim of our assessment is to evaluate the overall user satisfaction and the perceived quality in use thanks to two concrete case studies. Firstly, we concentrate our attention on contextual information and navigation, and on authoring tool; secondly, we provide a semantic mapping of tags of the system folksonomy, contrasted and compared to the expert users' classi cation, allowing a bridge between social and semantic knowledge according to its constantly mutual growth. The performed user evaluations analyses results are promising, reporting a high level of agreement on the perceived quality in use of both the applications and of the speci c analyzed features, demonstrating that a social-semantic contextual model improves the general users' satisfactio

A big-data analytics method for capturing visitor activities and flows: the case of an island country

© 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Understanding how people move from one location to another is important both for smart city planners and destination managers. Big-data generated on social media sites have created opportunities for developing evidence-based insights that can be useful for decision-makers. While previous studies have introduced observational data analysis methods for social media data, there remains a need for method development—specifically for capturing people’s movement flows and behavioural details. This paper reports a study outlining a new analytical method, to explore people’s activities, behavioural, and movement details for people monitoring and planning purposes. Our method utilises online geotagged content uploaded by users from various locations. The effectiveness of the proposed method, which combines content capturing, processing and predicting algorithms, is demonstrated through a case study of the Fiji Islands. The results show good performance compared to other relevant methods and show applicability to national decisions and policies