Building dynamic relation tree from photo collections

Recognizing people and identifying their relations from images have significant social and business values. In this paper, we present an automated workflow that derives a relation tree for major characters in a photo collection by integrating technologies of face clustering and facial feature analysis together with contextual information. In particular, as people´s relations evolve over time, for image collections spanning a long period of time (e.g. a number of years), the concept of dynamic relation tree is proposed to represent people´s relations precisely. The procedure for building the relation tree is described, and sample results that show the evolution of people´s relations over time are discussed.