Collaborative Bayesian Image Annotation and Retrieval

With nearly twenty years of intensive study on the content-based image retrieval and annotation, the topic still remains difficult. By and large, the essential challenge lies in the limitation of using low-level visual features to characterize the semantic information of images, commonly known as the semantic gap. To bridge this gap, various approaches have been proposed based on the incorporation of human knowledge and textual information as well as the learning techniques utilizing the information of different modalities. At the same time, contextual information which represents the relationship between different real world/conceptual entities has shown its significance with respect to recognition tasks not only through real life experience but also scientific studies. In this chapter, the authors first review the state of the art of the existing works on image annotation and retrieval. Moreover, a general Bayesian framework which integrates content and contextual information and its application to both image annotation and retrieval are elaborated. The contextual information is considered as the statistical relationship between different images and different semantic concepts for image retrieval and annotation, respectively. The framework has efficient learning and classification procedures and the effectiveness is evaluated based on experimental studies, which demonstrate its advantage over both content-based and context-based approaches.