Binary codes embedding for fast image tagging with incomplete labels

Abstract

Tags have been popularly utilized for better annotating, organizing and searching for desirable images. Image tagging is the problem of automatically assigning tags to images. One major challenge for image tagging is that the existing/training labels associated with image examples might be incomplete and noisy. Valuable prior work has focused on improving the accuracy of the assigned tags, but very limited work tackles the efficiency issue in image tagging, which is a critical problem in many large scale real world applications. This paper proposes a novel Binary Codes Embedding approach for Fast Image Tagging (BCE-FIT) with incomplete labels. In particular, we construct compact binary codes for both image examples and tags such that the observed tags are consistent with the constructed binary codes. We then formulate the problem of learning binary codes as a discrete optimization problem. An efficient iterative method is developed to solve the relaxation problem, followed by a novel binarization method based on orthogonal transformation to obtain the binary codes from the relaxed solution. Experimental results on two large scale datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve similar accuracy with state-of-the-art methods while using much less time, which is important for large scale applications. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.