Large-scale image annotation using visual synset

Abstract

We address the problem of large-scale annotation of web images. Our approach is based on the concept of visual synset, which is an organization of images which are visually-similar and semantically-related. Each visual synset represents a single prototypical visual concept, and has an associated set of weighted annotations. Linear SVM's are utilized to predict the visual synset membership for unseen image examples, and a weighted voting rule is used to construct a ranked list of predicted annotations from a set of visual synsets. We demonstrate that visual synsets lead to better performance than standard methods on a new annotation database containing more than 200 million images and 300 thousand annotations, which is the largest ever reported.