Automatic image tagging via category label and web data

Abstract

Image tagging is an important technique for the image content understanding and text based image processing. Given a selection of images, how to tag these images efficiently and effectively is an interesting problem. In this paper, a novel semi-auto image tagging technique is proposed: By assigning each image a category label first, our method can automatically recommend those promising tags to each image by utilizing existing vast web data. The main contributions of our paper can be highlighted as follows: (i) By assigning each image a category label, our method can automatically recommend other tags to the image, thus reducing the human annotation efforts. Meanwhile, our method guarantee tags' diversity due to abundant web data. (ii) We use sparse coding to automatically select those semantically related images for tag propagation. (iii) Local & global ranking agglomeration will make our method robust to noisy tags. We use Event dataset as the images to be tagged, and crawled Flickr images with their associated tags according to the category label in Event dataset as the auxiliary web data. Experimental results show that our method achieves promising performance for image tagging, which proves the effectiveness of our method. © 2010 ACM.