This is the process in which images are associated with symbols (keywords or tags) automatically instead of manually being labeled as in some approaches. Most of the approaches are implemented by machine learning, pattern recognition, and computer vision. The annotated symbols describe the image content in the semantic concept level.
Published in Chapter:
Probability Association Approach in Automatic Image Annotation
Feng Xu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China) and Yu-Jin Zhang (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 12
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-857-4.ch056
Abstract
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has wide applications in public life. Either from a static image database or from the Web, one can search for a specific image, generally browse to make an interactive choice, and search for a picture to go with a broad story or to illustrate a document. Although CBIR has been well studied, it is still a challenging problem to search for images from a large image database because of the well-acknowledged semantic gap between low-level features and high-level semantic concepts. An alternative solution is to use keyword-based approaches, which usually associate images with keywords by either manually labeling or automatically extracting surrounding text from Web pages. Although such a solution is widely adopted by most existing commercial image search engines, it is not perfect. First, manual annotation, though precise, is expensive and difficult to extend to large-scale databases. Second, automatically extracted surrounding text might by incomplete and ambiguous in describing images, and even more, surrounding text may not be available in some applications. To overcome these problems, automated image annotation is considered as a promising approach in understanding and describing the content of images.