ConceptRank for search-based image annotation

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Multimedia information is becoming an ubiquitous part of our lives, which brings an equally ubiquitous need for efficient multimedia retrieval. One of the...     

Multi-view multi-label learning for image annotation

Image annotation is posed as multi-class classification problem. Pursuing higher accuracy is a permanent but not stale challenge in the field of image annotation. To further improve the accuracy of image annotation, we propose a multi-view multi-label (abbreviated by MVML) learning algorithm, in which we take multiple feature (i.e., view) and ensemble learning into account simultaneously. By doing so, we make full use of the complementarity among the views and the base learners of ensemble learning, leading to higher accuracy of image annotation. With respect to the different distribution of positive and negative training examples, we propose two versions of MVML: the Boosting and Bagging versions of MVML. The former is suitable for learning over balanced examples while the latter applies to the opposite scenario. Besides, the weights of base learner is evaluated on validation data instead of training data, which will improve the generalization ability of the final ensemble classifiers. The experimental results have shown that the MVML is superior to the ensemble SVM of single view.     

Neural ranking for automatic image annotation

Automatic image annotation aims to predict labels for images according to their semantic contents and has become a research focus in computer vision, as it helps people to edit, retrieve and understand large image collections. In the last decades, researchers have proposed many approaches to solve this task and achieved remarkable performance on several standard image datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel learning to rank approach to address image auto-annotation problem. Unlike typical learning to rank algorithms for image auto-annotation which directly rank annotations for image, our approach consists of two phases. In the first phase, neural ranking models are trained to rank image’s semantic neighbors. Then nearest-neighbor based models propagate annotations from these semantic neighbors to the image. Thus our approach integrates learning to rank algorithms and nearest-neighbor based models, including TagProp and 2PKNN, and inherits their advantages. Experimental results show that our method achieves better or comparable performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods on four challenging benchmarks including Corel5K, ESP Games, IAPR TC-12 and NUS-WIDE.

     

Scalable search-based image annotation

With the popularity of digital cameras, more and more people have accumulated considerable digital images on their personal devices. As a result, there are increasing needs to effectively search these personal images. Automatic image annotation may serve the goal, for the annotated keywords could facilitate the search processes. Although many image annotation methods have been proposed in recent years, their effectiveness on arbitrary personal images is constrained by their limited scalability, i.e. limited lexicon of small-scale training set. To be scalable, we propose a search-based image annotation algorithm that is analogous to information retrieval. First, content-based image retrieval technology is used to retrieve a set of visually similar images from a large-scale Web image set. Second, a text-based keyword search technique is used to obtain a ranked list of candidate annotations for each retrieved image. Third, a fusion algorithm is used to combine the ranked lists into a final candidate annotation list. Finally, the candidate annotations are re-ranked using Random Walk with Restarts and only the top ones are reserved as the final annotations. The application of both efficient search techniques and Web-scale image set guarantees the scalability of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, we provide an annotation rejection scheme to point out the images that our annotation system cannot handle well. Experimental results on U. Washington dataset show not only the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm but also the advantage of image retrieval using annotation results over that using visual features.     

彩色序列图像中的人脸检测与跟踪

提出了一种彩色视频序列图像中的人脸检测与跟踪方法.该方法将人脸检测与人脸跟踪有效地结合在一起,采用Condensation滤波跟踪算法对区域进行跟踪,在跟踪过程中提出引入基于支持向量机的人脸置信度,样本的置信度随时间进行更新,人脸检测的结果基于置信度的后验概率.同时,该方法对Condensation滤波跟踪算法作了改进,在跟踪过程中采用了基于Metropolis算法的重采样方法以及自适应的动态模型,实现了复杂背景下的对人脸自由运动的跟踪,且精度较高.实验结果表明,该方法有效地解决了复杂背景中人脸姿态变化情况下的人脸检测与跟踪问题,与静态人脸检测相比有更好的检测效果.     

一种基于改进的支持向量机多分类器图像标注方法

针对多标签图像标注问题,提出一种改进的支持向量机多分类器图像标注方法。首先引入直方图交叉距离作为核函数,然后把传统支持向量机的输出值变换为样本到超平面的距离。基于这两点改进,采用一种特征选择方法,从众多的图像特征中,选择那些相互之间冗余度较小的视觉特征,分别建立分类器,最终形成以距离大小为判别依据的支持向量机多分类器模型。此外,在建立分类器时,考虑到训练图像中不同标签类样本分布的不均匀,引入了一个关于图像类标签的概率分布值做为分类器的权重系数。实验采用ImageCLEF提供的图像标注数据集,在其上的实验验证了所采用的特征选择算法和多分类模型的有效性,其标注精度要优于其他传统分类模型,并且,实验结果与最新的方法相比也具有一定的竞争力。     

Learning multi-task local metrics for image annotation

The goal of image annotation is to automatically assign a set of textual labels to an image to describe the visual contents thereof. Recently, with the rapid increase in the number of web images, nearest neighbor (NN) based methods have become more attractive and have shown exciting results for image annotation. One of the key challenges of these methods is to define an appropriate similarity measure between images for neighbor selection. Several distance metric learning (DML) algorithms derived from traditional image classification problems have been applied to annotation tasks. However, a fundamental limitation of applying DML to image annotation is that it learns a single global distance metric over the entire image collection and measures the distance between image pairs in the image-level. For multi-label annotation problems, it may be more reasonable to measure similarity of image pairs in the label-level. In this paper, we develop a novel label prediction scheme utilizing multiple label-specific local metrics for label-level similarity measure, and propose two different local metric learning methods in a multi-task learning (MTL) framework. Extensive experimental results on two challenging annotation datasets demonstrate that 1) utilizing multiple local distance metrics to learn label-level distances is superior to using a single global metric in label prediction, and 2) the proposed methods using the MTL framework to learn multiple local metrics simultaneously can model the commonalities of labels, thereby facilitating label prediction results to achieve state-of-the-art annotation performance.     

Methods for automatic and assisted image annotation

Personal memories composed of digital pictures are very popular at the moment. To retrieve these media items annotation is required. During the last years, several approaches have been proposed in order to overcome the image annotation problem. This paper presents our proposals to address this problem. Automatic and semi-automatic learning methods for semantic concepts are presented. The automatic method is based on semantic concepts estimated using visual content, context metadata and audio information. The semi-automatic method is based on results provided by a computer game. The paper describes our proposals and presents their evaluations.     

Incorporating multiple SVMs for automatic image annotation

In this paper, a novel automatic image annotation system is proposed, which integrates two sets of support vector machines (SVMs), namely the multiple instance learning (MIL)-based and global-feature-based SVMs, for annotation. The MIL-based bag features are obtained by applying MIL on the image blocks, where the enhanced diversity density (DD) algorithm and a faster searching algorithm are applied to improve the efficiency and accuracy. They are further input to a set of SVMs for finding the optimum hyperplanes to annotate training images. Similarly, global color and texture features, including color histogram and modified edge histogram, are fed into another set of SVMs for categorizing training images. Consequently, two sets of image features are constructed for each test image and are, respectively, sent to the two sets of SVMs, whose outputs are incorporated by an automatic weight estimation method to obtain the final annotation results. Our proposed annotation approach demonstrates a promising performance for an image database of 12 000 general-purpose images from COREL, as compared with some current peer systems in the literature.     

Standards for image annotation using Semantic Web

The impetus behind Semantic Web research remains the vision of supplementing availability with utility; that is, the World Wide Web provides availability of digital media, but the Semantic Web will allow presently available digital media to be used in unseen ways. An example of such an application is multimedia retrieval. At present, there are vast amounts of digital media available on the web. Once this media gets associated with machine-understandable metadata, the web can serve as a potentially unlimited supplier for multimedia web services, which could populate themselves by searching for keywords and subsequently retrieving images or articles, which is precisely the type of system that is proposed in this paper. Such a system requires solid interoperability, a central ontology, semantic agent search capabilities, and standards. Specifically, this paper explores this cross-section of image annotation and Semantic Web services, models the web service components that constitute such a system, discusses the sequential, cooperative execution of these Semantic Web services, and introduces intelligent storage of image semantics as part of a semantic link space.     

A two-level model for automatic image annotation

Image automatic annotation is a significant and challenging problem in pattern recognition and computer vision. Current image annotation models almost used all the training images to estimate joint generation probabilities between images and keywords, which would inevitably bring a lot of irrelevant images. To solve the above problem, we propose a hierarchical image annotation model which combines advantages of discriminative model and generative model. In first annotation layer, discriminative model is used to assign topic annotations to unlabeled images, and then relevant image set corresponding to each unlabeled image is obtained. In second annotation layer, we propose a keywords-oriented method to establish links between images and keywords, and then our iterative algorithm is used to expand relevant image sets. Candidate labels will be given higher weights by using our method based on visual keywords. Finally, generative model is used to assign detailed annotations to unlabeled images on expanded relevant image sets. Experiments conducted on Corel 5K datasets verify the effectiveness of our hierarchical image annotation model.     

The effectiveness of image features based on fractal image coding for image annotation

Image annotation is a process of assigning metadata to digital images in the form of captions or keywords, and has been regarded as image management and one of the most crucial processes of image retrieval. And many automatic methods have been proposed. However, these methods still have some problems respectively. Fractals are fragmented geometries and can be considered separate parts; each part is similar to the contracted overall shape. Fractal features provide geometric information of an image that is irrelevant to the shape and size of an object in the image; therefore, fractal features are more robust than color and texture features. Therefore, this study proposed a fractal-driven image annotation (FIA) schema that extracts fractal features through fractal image coding and integrates color and texture as new visual features to conduct image-based annotation. Experimental results indicate that the effect of thresholds on annotating accuracy is insignificant. This finding supports the application of FIA on complex practical environments, reduces the time for identifying the optimal thresholds, and improves the practicality of using FIA in real environments.     

A probabilistic semantic model for image annotation and multi-modal image retrieval

This paper addresses automatic image annotation problem and its application to multi-modal image retrieval. The contribution of our work is three-fold. (1) We propose a probabilistic semantic model in which the visual features and the textual words are connected via a hidden layer which constitutes the semantic concepts to be discovered to explicitly exploit the synergy among the modalities. (2) The association of visual features and textual words is determined in a Bayesian framework such that the confidence of the association can be provided. (3) Extensive evaluation on a large-scale, visually and semantically diverse image collection crawled from Web is reported to evaluate the prototype system based on the model. In the proposed probabilistic model, a hidden concept layer which connects the visual feature and the word layer is discovered by fitting a generative model to the training image and annotation words through an Expectation-Maximization (EM) based iterative learning procedure. The evaluation of the prototype system on 17,000 images and 7736 automatically extracted annotation words from crawled Web pages for multi-modal image retrieval has indicated that the proposed semantic model and the developed Bayesian framework are superior to a state-of-the-art peer system in the literature.     

基于日志的协同图像自动标注

反馈日志隐含的图像语义信息有助于图像自动标注,但日志数据中存在的噪声、片面性等问题制约了其作用,故提出基于日志的协同图像自动标注算法。根据日志获取的特点,采用增量关联规则挖掘处理日志信息去除其噪声,利用协同滤波思想扩展图像标注词数量,利用WordNet得到标注词间关系,并结合图像底层特征利用混合概率模型实现图像自动标注。在Corel5K和互联网数据集上的实验表明：该算法降低了日志噪声及片面性所带来的影响,提高了图像自动标注效率和质量。     

Semi-automatic dynamic auxiliary-tag-aided image annotation

Image annotation is the foundation for many real-world applications. In the age of Web 2.0, image search and browsing are largely based on the tags of images. In this paper, we formulate image annotation as a multi-label learning problem, and develop a semi-automatic image annotation system. The presented system chooses proper words from a vocabulary as tags for a given image, and refines the tags with the help of the user's feedback. The refinement amounts to a novel multi-label learning framework, named Semi-Automatic Dynamic Auxiliary-Tag-Aided (SADATA), in which the classification result for one certain tag (target tag) can be boosted by the classification results of a subset of the other tags (auxiliary tags). The auxiliary tags, which have strong correlations with the target tag, are determined in terms of the normalized mutual information. We only select those tags whose correlations exceed a threshold as the auxiliary tags, so the auxiliary set is sparse. How much an auxiliary tag can contribute is dependent on the image, so we also build a probabilistic model conditioned on the auxiliary tag and the input image to adjust the weight of the auxiliary tag dynamically. For an given image, the user feedback on the tags corrects the outputs of the auxiliary classifiers and SADATA will recommend more proper tags next round. SADATA is evaluated on a large collection of Corel images. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our dynamic auxiliary-tag-aided method. Furthermore, the performance also benefits from user feedbacks such that the annotation procedure can be significantly speeded up.     

Enhanced representation and multi-task learning for image annotation

In this paper we propose a novel biased random sampling strategy for image representation in Bag-of-Words models. We evaluate its impact on the feature properties and the ranking quality for a set of semantic concepts and show that it improves performance of classifiers in image annotation tasks and increases the correlation between kernels and labels. As second contribution we propose a method called Output Kernel Multi-Task Learning (MTL) to improve ranking performance by transfer information between classes. The main advantages of output kernel MTL are that it permits asymmetric information transfer between tasks and scales to training sets of several thousand images. We give a theoretical interpretation of the method and show that the learned contributions of source tasks to target tasks are semantically consistent. Both strategies are evaluated on the ImageCLEF PhotoAnnotation dataset.Our best visual result which used the MTL method was ranked first according to mean Average Precision (mAP) within the purely visual submissions in the ImageCLEF 2011 PhotoAnnotation Challenge. Our multi-modal submission achieved the first rank by mAP among all submissions in the same competition.     

Effective image annotation for searches using multilevel semantics

There is an increasing need for automatic image annotation tools to enable effective image searching in digital libraries. In this paper, we present a novel probabilistic model for image annotation based on content-based image retrieval techniques and statistical analysis. One key difficulty in applying statistical methods to the annotation of images is that the number of manually labeled images used to train the methods is normally insufficient. Numerous keywords cannot be correctly assigned to appropriate images due to lacking or missing information in the labeled image databases. To deal with this challenging problem, we also propose an enhanced model in which the annotated keywords of a new image are defined in terms of their similarity at different semantic levels, including the image level, keyword level, and concept level. To avoid missing some relevant keywords, the model labels the keywords with the same concepts as the new image. Our experimental results show that the proposed models are effective for annotating images that have different qualities of training data.