What makes Big Visual Data hard?

There are an estimated 3.5 trillion photographs in the world, of which 10% have been taken in the past 12 months. Facebook alone reports 6 billion photo uploads per month. Every minute, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Cisco estimates that in the next few years, visual data (photos and video) will account for over 85% of total internet traffic. Yet, we currently lack effective computational methods for making sense of all this mass of visual data. Unlike easily indexed content, such as text, visual content is not routinely searched or mined; it's not even hyperlinked. Visual data is Internet's "digital dark matter" [Perona,2010] -- it's just sitting there!

In this talk, I will first discuss some of the unique challenges that make Big Visual Data difficult compared to other types of content. In particular, I will argue that the central problem is the lack a good measure of similarity for visual data. I will then present some of our recent work that aims to address this challenge in the context of visual matching, image retrieval and visual data mining. As an application of the latter, we used Google Street View data for an entire city in an attempt to answer that age-old question which has been vexing poets (and poets-turned-geeks): "What makes Paris look like Paris?"