Predicting participants in public events using stock photos

Pictures taken by journalists for distribution and for inclusion in stock photo collections are often enriched with metadata. One key aspect of such photos is that they focus largely on events and feature celebrities and other public figures. They may provide interesting insights into how such public figures are related to each other in terms of the events they attend, and in their social proximity in terms of how often they are photographed together. In this paper, we study a corpus of approximately 9 million stock photographs taken over a 10 year period and, using their metadata, we extract a social network from co-appearance of public figures in events depicted in the photographs. We exploit this latent social information and combine it with the rich image metadata to explore the possibility of predicting attendees at future events, showing promising performance for this task.