Pics 'n' Trails Dataset

“Pics ‘n’ 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.

This dataset is shared with the support of Microsoft Research Asia, under a faculty-specific research project titled "Novel User Interaction Techniques for Retrieval from Large Collections of Socio-spatio-temporal Multimedia."

Project Members

Chaminda de Silva
Assistant Professor (Research)
Interfaculty Initiative in Information Sciences, the University of Tokyo

Xing Xie
Lead Researcher
Web Search and Mining Group, Microsoft Research Asia

Yuki Arase
Associate Researcher
Natural Language Computing Group, Microsoft Research Asia

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

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 by sending an email to Chaminda de Silva (chamds<at>hal.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp), 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 Pics 'n' Trails Version 1.0.0 Last updated 8th October 2010 Log of Updates

By downloading this dataset, you agree to the terms and conditions of its license.

Paper Citation

Please cite the following two publications when using 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. If you are using only one type of data for your work, it is sufficient to cite only the relevant publication.

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