Visually weighted neighbor voting for image tag relevance learning

Abstract

The presence of non-relevant tags in image folksonomies hampers the effective organization and retrieval of user-contributed images. In this paper, we propose to learn the relevance of user-supplied tags by means of visually weighted neighbor voting, a variant of the popular baseline neighbor voting algorithm proposed by Li et al. (IEEE Trans Multimedia 11(7):1310–1322, 2009). To gain insight into the effectiveness of baseline and visually weighted neighbor voting, we qualitatively analyze the difference in tag relevance when using a different number of neighbors, for both tags relevant and tags not relevant to the content of a seed image. Our qualitative analysis shows that tag relevance values computed by means of visually weighted neighbor voting are more stable and representative than tag relevance values computed by means of baseline neighbor voting. This is quantitatively confirmed through extensive experimentation with MIRFLICKR-25000, studying the variation of tag relevance values as a function of the number of neighbors used (for both tags relevant and tags not relevant with respect to the content of a seed image), as well as the influence of tag relevance learning on the effectiveness of image tag refinement, tag-based image retrieval, and image tag recommendation.