The Internet is playing an increasingly crucial role in destination marketing and it is used as a major marketing tool among National Tourism Organizations (NTOs). Website design is influential for consumers' Website preference and destination selection. This study is to understand the application of image-based technology by the major National Tourism Organizations (NTOs) through the collection and comparison of static images and dynamic images presented in their official tourism Websites. Data collected from the sampling of the world's top 25 tourism destination nations reveals that all National Tourism Organizations (NTOs) use either static images or dynamic images for their Websites, but the use of static images are far more popular than that of dynamic images.

Static image action recognition aims at identifying the action performed in a given image. Most existing static image action recognition approaches use high-level cues present in the image such as objects, object human interaction, or human pose to better capture the action performed. Unlike images, videos have temporal information that greatly improves action recognition by resolving potential ambiguity. We propose to leverage a large amount of readily available unlabeled videos to transfer the temporal information from video domain to static image domain and hence improve static image action recognition. Specifically, We propose a video prediction model to predict the future video of a static image and use the future predicted video to improve static image action recognition. Our experimental results on four datasets validate that the idea of transferring the temporal information from videos to static images is promising, and can enhance static image action recognition performance. / Master of Science

Digital image watermarking has developed for the purpose of protecting intellectual property rights to multimedia data. The focus of this thesis is searching for an alternative solution of digital image watermarking methods. A detailed analysis of watermarking methods particularly in the frequency domain, and the modification of these methods are the main aim of this work. Improved performance in watermark extraction is one of the main goals. First, the common static image watermarking methods, possible attacks on the watermarked data and techniques for objective measurement of watermarked image quality are shortly introduced. Techniques which use the space domain for watermarking ar described in the next part of this work. It is about techniques which insert the watermark into the least significant bits of an image both in the RGB domain and in the YUV domain. The main part of the thesis depicts modified and newly developed static image watermarking methods in the frequency domain. These methods use various transforms and error-correction codes, by means of which the watermark robustness increases. All the methods developed are tested in MATLAB. Results together with tables and graphs are one part of work. The end of the thesis is devoted to a comparison of all the developed methods and their evaluation.