Picture the past from the present
Mobile multimedia computing and services can enhance the ways people live, work, play and travel. In this paper, we present an application of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) technology to retrieving historical images for enhancing the experience of tourists visiting historical attractions. We adapt a video object retrieval approach and use images taken with modern cameras or smartphones as query examples to find other images of the same place from an online historical photograph collection containing over 80,000 images recording the history of the local communities of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in England over the last hundred years. We present preliminary results to show that advanced video object retrieval technology can be potentially very useful for delivering mobile multimedia services to enable visitors to explore the visual history of attractions.