A ten-year literature review of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) studies in the tourism industry

Abstract

Purpose Due to the worldwide growth of digital image sharing and the maturity of the tourism industry, the vast and growing collections of digital images have become a challenge for those who use and/or manage these image data across tourism settings. To overcome the image indexing task with less labour cost and improve the image retrieval task with less human errors, the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) technique has been investigated for the tourism domain particularly. This paper aims to review the relevant literature in the field to understand these previous works and identify research gaps for future directions. Design/methodology/approach A systematic and comprehensive review of CBIR studies in tourism from the year 2010 to 2019, focussing on journal articles and conference proceedings in reputable online databases, is conducted by taking a comparative approach to critically analyse and address the trends of each fundamental element in these research experiments. Findings Based on the review of the literature, the trends of CBIR studies in tourism is to improve image representation and retrieval by advancing existing feature extraction techniques, contributing novel techniques in the feature extraction process through fine-tuning fusion features and improving image query of CBIR systems. Co-authorship, tourist attraction sector and fusion image features have been in focus. Nonetheless, the number of studies in other tourism sectors and available image databases could be further explored. Originality/value The fact that no existing academic review of CBIR studies in tourism makes this paper a novel contribution.