So much for tagging photographs with names, locations and activities yourself – a new cell phone application can take care of that for you.

Chuan Qin, left, Xuan Bao, right

Dubbed TagSense, the new app was developed by students from Duke University and the University of South Carolina (USC) and unveiled at the ninth Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), being held in Washington, D.C.

Bao and Chuan Qin, a visiting graduate student from USC, developed the app working with Romit Roy Choudhury, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. Qin and Bao are currently involved in summer internships at Microsoft Research.

By using information about the environment of a photograph, the students believe they can achieve a more accurate tagging of a particular photograph than could be achieved by facial recognition alone. Such information about a photograph’s entirety provides additional details that can then be searched at a later time.

For example, the phone’s built-in accelerometer can tell if a person is standing still for a posed photograph, bowling or even dancing. Light sensors in the phone’s camera can tell if the shot is being taken indoors or outdoors on a sunny or cloudy day. The sensors can also approximate environmental conditions – such as snow or rain — by looking up the weather conditions at that time and location. The microphone can detect whether or not a person in the photograph is laughing, or quiet. All of these attributes are then assigned to each photograph, the students said.

Bao pointed out that with multiple tags describing more than just a particular person’s name, it would be easier to not only organize an album of photographs for future reference, but find particular photographs years later. With the exploding number of digital pictures in the cloud and in our personal computers, the ability to easily search and retrieve desired pictures will be valuable in the future, he said.

The students envision that TagSense would most likely be adopted by groups of people, such as friends, who would “opt in,” allowing their mobile phone capabilities to be harnessed when members of the group were together. Importantly, Roy Choudhury added, TagSense would not request sensed data from nearby phones that do not belong to this group, thereby protecting users’ privacy.

The experiments were conducted using eight Google Nexus One mobile phones on more than 200 photos taken at various locations across the Duke campus, including classroom buildings, gyms and the art museum.

The current application is a prototype, and the researchers believe that a commercial product could be available in a few years.