Large Scale Image Annotation
I just attended ACM Multimedia 2009 in Beijing to present a paper on image annotation in the workshop on Large Scale Multimedia Retrieval and Mining. The multimedia research community is grappling with a dramatic increase in the scale of its information management problems in an era of rapid growth in user-generated content and negligible distribution costs (i.e. YouTube and flickr). The workshop itself devoted attention to both retrieval and mining, while the content track of the main conference seemed to be dominated by search applications.
When the observation is made that tagged multimedia data is now freely and abundantly available, it’s usually to motivate papers on media search rather than annotation. This is in part due to the challenges of adapting established model-based annotation methods to large media collections and large tag sets. Alternatively, search-based annotation achieves scalability at the expense of accuracy, at least in comparison to model-based approaches. Our workshop paper looked to combine the efficiency of search-based approaches with the accuracy afforded by model-based classification. Continue Reading