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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.

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.

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.

The fact that no existing academic review of CBIR studies in tourism makes this paper a novel contribution.

Because of the fast-growing digital image collections on online platforms and the transfer learning ability of deep learning technology, image classification could be improved and implemented for the hostel domain, which has complex clusters of image contents. This paper aims to test the potential of 11 pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) with transfer learning for hostel image classification on the first hostel image database to advance the knowledge and fill the gap academically, as well as to suggest an alternative solution in optimal image classification with less labour cost and human errors to those who manage hostel image collections.

The hostel image database is first created with data pre-processing steps, data selection and data augmentation. Then, the systematic and comprehensive investigation is divided into seven experiments to test 11 pretrained CNNs which transfer learning was applied and parameters were fine-tuned to match this newly created hostel image dataset. All experiments were conducted in Google Colaboratory environment using PyTorch.

The 7,350 hostel image database is created and labelled into seven classes. Furthermore, its experiment results highlight that DenseNet 121 and DenseNet 201 have the greatest potential for hostel image classification as they outperform other CNNs in terms of accuracy and training time.

The fact that there is no existing academic work dedicating to test pretrained CNNs with transfer learning for hostel image classification and no existing hostel image-only database have made this paper a novel contribution.