IMPLEMENTATION RESULTS OF SEARCH PHOTO AND TOPOGRAPHIC INFORMATION RETRIEVAL AT A LOCATION

Tourism is the strongest and largest industry in the global economy. It has played a significant role in boosting the city's economy and social employment. There has been a large increase in the number of people out on tours, for the sake of recreation and entertainment. In the traditional tourism industry, tourist information is obtained mainly through newspaper, magazines, friends and other simple ways.. Such traditional sources are user-friendly but, they have some serious limitations. First, the suggestions from friends are limited to those places they have visited before. Second, the information from travel agencies is sometime biased since agents tend to recommend businesses they are associated with. Moreover, information available from the Internet is too overwhelming and the users have to spend a long time finding those that they are interested in. Thus, trying to eliminate this difficulty SPATIAL employs geo-tagged images to show the interesting scenes of different places. Detailed texts, images, paths and other guidance information are provided, so people can better understand the tourist attractions and make their decision objectively. In this paper, we present the successful implementation of a photo and topographic information search. A user can provide a desired keyword describing the place of interest, and the system will look into its database for places that share the visual characteristics. One can select two locations on the map; the latitude, longitude of the selected area, the path and the distance between the two places would appear. Then from the multiple paths, user can select either path and images of famous places would be displayed. These images are broadly classified into categories such as holy places, universities, historical monuments, nature-driven places and wildlife. One can also see the detailed information of the selected place as well as of the selected image.