Photo2Trip: Generating Travel Routes from Geo-Tagged Photos for Trip Planning

Travel route planning is an important step for a tourist
to prepare his/her trip. As a common scenario, a tourist
usually asks the following questions when he/she is planning
his/her trip in an unfamiliar place: 1) Are there any
travel route suggestions for a one-day or three-day trip in
Beijing? 2) What is the most popular travel path within
the Forbidden City? To facilitate a tourist’s trip planning,
in this paper, we target at solving the problem of automatic
travel route planning. We propose to leverage existing
travel clues recovered from 20 million geo-tagged photos
collected from www.panoramio.com to suggest customized
travel route plans according to users’ preferences. As the
footprints of tourists at memorable destinations, the geotagged
photos could be naturally used to discover the travel
paths within a destination (attractions/landmarks) and travel
routes between destinations. Based on the information discovered
from geo-tagged photos, we can provide a customized
trip plan for a tourist, i.e., the popular destinations to visit,
the visiting order of destinations, the time arrangement in
each destination, and the typical travel path within each
destination. Users are also enabled to specify personal preference
such as visiting location, visiting time/season, travel
duration, and destination style in an interactive manner to
guide the system. Owning to 20 million geo-tagged photos
and 200; 000 travelogues, an online system has been developed
to help users plan travel routes for over 30; 000 attractions/
landmarks in more than 100 countries and territories.
Experimental results show the intelligence and effectiveness
of the proposed framework.