Hybrid image representation methods for automatic image annotation: a survey

In most automatic image annotation systems, images are represented with low level features using either global methods or local methods. In global methods, the entire image is used as a unit. Local methods divide images into blocks where fixed-size sub-image blocks are adopted as sub-units; or into regions by using segmented regions as sub-units in images. In contrast to typical automatic image annotation methods that use either global or local features exclusively, several recent methods have considered incorporating the two kinds of information, and believe that the combination of the two levels of features is beneficial in annotating images. In this paper, we provide a survey on automatic image annotation techniques according to one aspect: feature extraction, and, in order to complement existing surveys in literature, we focus on the emerging image annotation methods: hybrid methods that combine both global and local features for image representation

MIRACLE’s Naive Approach to Medical Images Annotation

One of the proposed tasks of the ImageCLEF 2005 campaign has been an Automatic Annotation Task. The objective is to provide the classification of a given set of 1,000 previously unseen medical (radiological) images according to 57 predefined categories covering different medical pathologies. 9,000 classified training images are given which can be used in any way to train a classifier. The Automatic Annotation task uses no textual information, but image-content information only. This paper describes our participation in the automatic annotation task of ImageCLEF 2005

Automatic Annotation of Images from the Practitioner Perspective

This paper describes an ongoing project which seeks to contribute to a wider understanding of the realities of bridging the semantic gap in visual image retrieval. A comprehensive survey of the means by which real image retrieval transactions are realised is being undertaken. An image taxonomy has been developed, in order to provide a framework within which account may be taken of the plurality of image types, user needs and forms of textual metadata. Significant limitations exhibited by current automatic annotation techniques are discussed, and a possible way forward using ontologically supported automatic content annotation is briefly considered as a potential means of mitigating these limitations

Context-aware person identification in personal photo collections

Identifying the people in photos is an important need for users of photo management systems. We present MediAssist, one such system which facilitates browsing, searching and semi-automatic annotation of personal photos, using analysis of both image content and the context in which the photo is captured. This semi-automatic annotation includes annotation of the identity of people in photos. In this paper, we focus on such person annotation, and propose person identification techniques based on a combination of context and content. We propose language modelling and nearest neighbor approaches to context-based person identification, in addition to novel face color and image color content-based features (used alongside face recognition and body patch features). We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of these techniques using the real private photo collections of a number of users, and show that combining context- and content-based analysis improves performance over content or context alone

Automatic human face detection for content-based image annotation

In this paper, an automatic human face detection approach using colour analysis is applied for content-based image annotation. In the face detection, the probable face region is detected by adaptive boosting algorithm, and then combined with a colour filtering classifier to enhance the accuracy in face detection. The initial experimental benchmark shows the proposed scheme can be efficiently applied for image annotation with higher fidelity

Automatic Image Annotation Using CMRM with Scene Information

Searching of digital images in a disorganized image collection is a challenging problem. One step of image searching is automatic image annotation. Automatic image annotation refers to the process of automatically assigning relevant text keywords to any given image, reflecting its content. In the past decade many automatic image annotation methods have been proposed and achieved promising result. However, annotation prediction from the methods is still far from accurate. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose an automatic annotation method using relevance model and scene information. CMRM proposed by [5] is one of automatic image annotation method based on relevance model approach. CMRM method assumes that regions in an image can be described using a small vocabulary of blobs. Blobs are generated from segmentation, feature extraction, and clustering. Given a training set of images with annotations, this method predicts the probability of generating a word given the blobs in an image. To improve annotation prediction accuracy of CMRM, in this paper we utilize scene information incorporate with CMRM. Our proposed method is called scene-CMRM. Global image region can be represented by features which indicate type of scene shown in the image. Thus, annotation prediction of CMRM could be more accurate based on that scene type. Our experiments showed that, the methods provides prediction with better precision than CMRM does, where precision represents the percentage of words that is correctly predicted

Enhanced image annotations based on spatial information extraction and ontologies

Current research on image annotation often represents images in terms of labelled regions or objects, but pays little attention to the spatial positions or relationships between those regions or objects. To be effective, general purpose image retrieval systems require images with comprehensive annotations describing fully the content of the image. Much research is being done on automatic image annotation schemes but few authors address the issue of spatial annotations directly. This paper begins with a brief analysis of real picture queries to librarians showing how spatial terms are used to formulate queries. The paper is then concerned with the development of an enhanced automatic image annotation system, which extracts spatial information about objects in the image. The approach uses region boundaries and region labels to generate annotations describing absolute object positions and also relative positions between pairs of objects. A domain ontology and spatial information ontology are also used to extract more complex information about the relative closeness of objects to the viewer

A framework for evaluating automatic image annotation algorithms

Several Automatic Image Annotation (AIA) algorithms have been introduced recently, which have been found to outperform previous models. However, each one of them has been evaluated using either different descriptors, collections or parts of collections, or "easy" settings. This fact renders their results non-comparable, while we show that collection-specific properties are responsible for the high reported performance measures, and not the actual models. In this paper we introduce a framework for the evaluation of image annotation models, which we use to evaluate two state-of-the-art AIA algorithms. Our findings reveal that a simple Support Vector Machine (SVM) approach using Global MPEG-7 Features outperforms state-of-the-art AIA models across several collection settings. It seems that these models heavily depend on the set of features and the data used, while it is easy to exploit collection-specific properties, such as tag popularity especially in the commonly used Corel 5K dataset and still achieve good performance