Abstract:

The ease of creating and capturing digital images, for example, increasing use of digital cameras, will lead to more images to be published on the World Wide Web. Faced with a large set of image collections, a Yahoo!-like image directory can help users get started, directing them into a particular subset of topics. However, the way to interpret images’ meanings brings the problem of the subjectivity of human perception. Hence, we propose an approach to automatically constructing personalized image taxonomy based on a hierarchical agglomerative algorithm. Personalized image taxonomy has the advantages of providing personalized image browsing and annotation. Given an image embedded in a Web document and the generated taxonomy, a set of terms derived from the document and the taxonomy can be properly selected as keywords to annotate the image. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is effective to construct image taxonomy and is practical in image annotation.