Automatic image annotation using a semi-supervised ensemble of classifiers

Abstract

Automatic image annotation consists on automatically labeling images, or image regions, with a pre-defined set of keywords, which are regarded as descriptors of the high-level semantics of the image. In supervised learning, a set of previously annotated images is required to train a classifier. Annotating a large quantity of images by hand is a tedious and time consuming process; so an alternative approach is to label manually a small subset of images, using the other ones under a semi-supervised approach. In this paper, a new semi-supervised ensemble of classifiers, called WSA, for automatic image annotation is proposed. WSA uses naive Bayes as its base classifier. A set of these is combined in a cascade based on the AdaBoost technique. However, when training the ensemble of Bayesian classifiers, it also considers the unlabeled images on each stage. These are annotated based on the classifier from the previous stage, and then used to train the next classifier. The unlabeled instances are weighted according to a confidence measure based on their predicted probability value; while the labeled instances are weighted according to the classifier error, as in standard AdaBoost. WSA has been evaluated with benchmark data sets, and 2 sets of images, with promising results. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.