Building an Image Annotation and Tourism Recommender System

Abstract

The interest in image annotation and recommendation has been increased due to the ever rising amount of data uploaded to the web. Despite the many efforts undertaken so far, accuracy or efficiency still remain open problems. Here, a complete image annotation and tourism recommender system is proposed. It is based on the probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) and hypergraph ranking, exploiting the visual attributes of the images and the semantic information found in image tags and geo-tags. In particular, semantic image annotation resorts to the PLSA, exploiting the textual information in image tags. It is further complemented by visual annotation based on visual image content classification. Tourist destinations, strongly related to a query image, are recommended using hypergraph ranking enhanced by enforcing group sparsity constraints. Experiments were conducted on a large image dataset of Greek sites collected from Flickr. The experimental results demonstrate the merits of the proposed model. Semantic image annotation by means of the PLSA has achieved an average precision of 92% at 10% recall. The accuracy of content-based image classification is 82, 6%. An average precision of 92% is measured at 1% recall for tourism recommendation.