Mining Travel Patterns from Geotagged Photos

Recently, the phenomenal advent of photo-sharing services, such as Flickr and Panoramio, have led to volumous community-contributed photos with text tags, timestamps, and geographic references on the Internet. The photos, together with their time- and geo-references, become the digital footprints of photo takers and implicitly document their spatiotemporal movements. This study aims to leverage the wealth of these enriched online photos to analyze people’s travel patterns at the local level of a tour destination. Specifically, we focus our analysis on two aspects: (1) tourist movement patterns in relation to the regions of attractions (RoA), and (2) topological characteristics of travel routes by different tourists. To do so, we first build a statistically reliable database of travel paths from a noisy pool of community-contributed geotagged photos on the Internet. We then investigate the tourist traffic flow among different RoAs by exploiting the Markov chain model. Finally, the topological characteristics of travel routes are analyzed by performing a sequence clustering on tour routes. Testings on four major cities demonstrate promising results of the proposed system.