“Photo Trails” is a large collection of GPS data and Digital photos captured by a single person over a period of more than a year. The GPS data were archived by continuously carrying a GPS receiver and recording the location coordinates at all times when they can be estimated. The photos, 4179 in total, were taken during sightseeing and other events.

Being a large collection of continuously archived multimedia, this dataset can be used in several research areas such as mining movement patterns, user activity detection, automatic creation of photo albums and travel stories, etc. It has been shared for the benefit of researchers working in these areas.

Data Description

The following is a quick summary of the dataset:

• Duration: December 30, 2007 to January 1, 2009
• Area: covers an approximate land area of 300,000 sq. km (mostly in Japan and a few other countries)
• Total distance traveled: approximately 35,000 km
• GPS coverage per day: 8-24 hours

We will later add additional GPS data and photos for specific travel and events. Please refer to the log of updates for details on such changes.
The GPS data are in the following format.



The dataset contains approximately one million data entries similar to the above. The data are stored in tab-separated ASCII text files.

The photos are JPEG images at a resolution of approximately two Megapixels. Their content corresponds to the work of an amateur photographer. There are several near-duplicate photos, with different camera settings. Complete EXIF data are available in all photos. The following are some examples from this photo collection.



The following screenshot shows EXIF data contained in one of the above photos.



Further documentation on the data and their format are included in the dataset.

Applications

The following are screenshots from two example applications built upon this dataset.

Locomotion Pattern Retrieval

Travel Story Creation

Users

Researchers at the following institutions have been using this dataset and/or its previous version (Pics 'n' Trails dataset):

• NTT Docomo Research Laboratories, Japan and Germany
• University of Trento, Italy
• Tampere University of Tech, Finland
• INESC – ID ( Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa) , Portugal
• INSA de Lyon, France
• University of Cyprus, Cyprus
• Technische Universitaet Darmstad. Germany
• Unicamp, Brazil
• The University of Tokyo, Japan
• Seoul National University, Korea
• Laxmi Niwas Mittal Institute of Information Technology, India
• IIIT Bhubaneswar, India
• Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China

Downloading the dataset

The dataset can be downloaded in the form of a .RAR archive. The archive is password-protected. You can get the password after making the payment for the dataset. For payment and licensing details, send an email to Chamin Morikawa (chamin <at> me.com), with the following details:

• Your name and affiliation
• Contact information
• Research topic (roughly) in which the dataset will be used

     The password is used merely to get an idea of who are using the dataset. We will also be able to inform you of any updates to the dataset, using your contact information.

Download the Dataset Download the Event Index Pics 'n' Trails Version 1.0.0 Last updated 5th January 2013

By downloading this dataset, you agree to the terms and conditions of its license. We will customize the license according to your research requirements.

Related Publications

The following publications outline the dataset:

[1]     G. C. de Silva, T. Yamasaki, K. Aizawa, "Sketch-Based Spatial Queries for Retrieving Human Locomotion Patterns From Continuously Archived GPS Data," Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on , vol.11, no.7, pp.1240-1253, Nov. 2009

[2]     G. C. de Silva, K. Aizawa, “Retrieving Multimedia Travel Stories Using Location Data and Spatial Queries”, In Proc. The 17th ACM international Conference on Multimedia, pp. 785-788, October 2009).

Reference [1] describes the location data, and reference [2] works on the photo collection.

Related Publications

Please help us to keep this list uptodate by sending the details of any publications resulting from your use of the data.

[1]     G. C. de Silva, K. Aizawa, “Interacting with location-based multimedia using sketches”, In Proc. The 17th ACM international Conference on Image and Video Retrieval, pp. 189-196, July 2010). PDF

[2]     G. C. de Silva, T. Yamasaki, K. Aizawa, "Sketch-Based Spatial Queries for Retrieving Human Locomotion Patterns From Continuously Archived GPS Data," Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on , vol.11, no.7, pp.1240-1253, November 2009. PDF

     [3]     G. C. de Silva, K. Aizawa, “Retrieving Multimedia Travel Stories Using Location Data and Spatial Queries”, In Proc. The 17th ACM international Conference on Multimedia, pp. 785-788, October 2009.  PDF