Geotag Propagation with User Trust Modeling

The amount of information that people share on social networks is constantly increasing. People also comment, annotate, and tag their own content (videos, photos, notes, etc.), as well as the content of others. In many cases, the content is tagged manually. One way to make this time-consuming manual tagging process more efficient is to propagate tags from a small set of tagged images to the larger set of untagged images automatically. In such a scenario, however, a wrong or a spam tag can damage the integrity and reliability of the automated propagation system. Users may make mistakes in tagging, or irrelevant tags and content may be added maliciously for advertisement or self-promotion. Therefore, a certain mechanism insuring the trustworthiness of users or published content is needed. In this chapter, we discuss several image retrieval methods based on tags, various approaches to trust modeling and spam protection in social networks, and trust modeling in geotagging systems. We then consider a specific example of automated geotag propagation system that adopts a user trust model. The tag propagation in images relies on the similarity between image content (famous landmarks) and its context (associated geotags). For each tagged image, similar untagged images are found by the robust graph-based object duplicate detection and the known tags are propagated accordingly. The user trust value is estimated based on a social feedback from the users of the photo-sharing system and only tags from trusted users are propagated. This approach demonstrates that a practical tagging system significantly benefits from the intelligent combination of efficient propagation algorithm and a user-centered trust model.