Tri-Select: A Multi-Stage Visual Data Selection Framework for Mobile Visual Crowdsensing

Abstract

Mobile visual crowdsensing enables large-scale, fine-grained environmental monitoring through the collection of images from distributed mobile devices. However, the resulting data is often redundant and heterogeneous due to overlapping acquisition perspectives, varying resolutions, and diverse user behaviors. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Tri-Select, a multi-stage visual data selection framework that efficiently filters redundant and low-quality images. Tri-Select operates in three stages: (1) metadata-based filtering to discard irrelevant samples; (2) spatial similarity-based spectral clustering to organize candidate images; and (3) a visual-feature-guided selection based on maximum independent set search to retain high-quality, representative images. Experiments on real-world and public datasets demonstrate that Tri-Select improves both selection efficiency and dataset quality, making it well-suited for scalable crowdsensing applications.