Tag Propagation

Photo adapted: GustavoG/Flickr

Summary

In the past few years sharing photos within social networks has become very popular. In order to make these huge collections easier to explore, images are usually tagged with representative keywords such as persons, events, objects, and locations. In order to speed up the time-consuming tag annotation process, tags can be propagated based on the similarity between image content and context.

We proposed an interactive online platform, called Cheese, that is capable of performing semi-automatic image annotation for an extensive online database. First, when the user marks a specific object in an image, the system performs an object duplicate detection and returns the search results with images containing similar objects. Then, the annotation of the object can be performed in two ways: (1) In the tag recommendation process, the system recommends tags associated with the object in images of the search results, among which, the user can accept some tags for the object in the given image. (2) In the tag propagation process, when the user enters his/her tag for the object, it is propagated to images in the search results.

Publications