Pinaki Sinha finished his doctoral dissertation (under my supervision) on automatic summarization of personal photo collections. As he states:
Photo taking and sharing devices (e.g., smart phones, digital cameras, etc) have become
extremely popular in recent times. Photo enthusiasts today capture moments of their personal
lives using these devices. This has resulted in huge collections of photos stored in
various personal archives. The exponential growth of online social networks and web based
photo sharing platforms have added fuel to this fire. According to recent estimates [46],
three billion photos are uploaded on the social network Facebook per month. This photo
data overload has created some major challenges. One of the them is automatic generation
of representative overviews from large photo collections. Manual browsing of photo
corpora is not only tedious, but also time inefficient. Hence, development of an automatic
photo summarization system is not only a research but also a practical challenge. In this
dissertation, we present a principled approach for generation of size constrained overview
summaries from large personal photo collections.
Considering the importance of the problem created by advances in photo related technology, this dissertation addresses
and makes good progress towards solving an important problem for many people. Very good dissertation.
Congratulations, Pinaki, for a job well-done.