Region-Based Graph Learning towards Large Scale Image Annotation
Graph-based learning provides a useful approach for modeling data in image annotation problems. In this chapter, the authors introduce how to construct a region-based graph to annotate large scale multi-label images. It has been well recognized that analysis in semantic region level may greatly improve image annotation performance compared to that in whole image level. However, the region level approach increases the data scale to several orders of magnitude and lays down new challenges to most existing algorithms. To this end, each image is firstly encoded as a Bag-of-Regions based on multiple image segmentations. And then, all image regions are constructed into a large k-nearest-neighbor graph with efficient Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) method. At last, a sparse and region-aware image-based graph is fed into the multi-label extension of the Entropic graph regularized semi-supervised learning algorithm (Subramanya & Bilmes, 2009). In combination they naturally yield the capability in handling large-scale dataset. Extensive experiments on NUS-WIDE (260k images) and COREL-5k datasets well validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework for region-aware and scalable multi-label propagation.