USED: A Large-scale Social Event Detection Dataset

Event discovery from single pictures is a challenging problem that has raised significant interest in the last decade. During this time, a number of interesting solutions have been proposed to tackle event discovery in still images. However, a large scale benchmarking image dataset for the evaluation and comparison of event discovery algorithms from single images is still lagging behind. To this aim, in this paper we provide a large-scale properly annotated and balanced dataset of 490,000 images, covering every aspect of 14 different types of social events, selected among the most shared ones in the social network. Such a large scale collection of event-related images is intended to become a powerful support tool for the research community in multimedia analysis by providing a common benchmark for training, testing, validation and comparison of existing and novel algorithms. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of how the dataset is collected, organized and how it can be beneficial for the researchers in the multimedia analysis domain. Moreover, a deep learning based approach is introduced into event discovery from single images as one of the possible applications of this dataset with a belief that deep learning can prove to be a breakthrough also in this research area. By providing this dataset, we hope to gather research community in the multimedia and signal processing domains to advance this application.