Towards ontologies for image interpretation and annotation

Due to the well-known semantic gap problem, a wide number of approaches have been proposed during the last decade for automatic image annotation, i.e. the textual description of images. Since these approaches are still not sufficiently efficient, a new trend is to use semantic hierarchies of concepts or ontologies to improve the image annotation process. This paper presents an overview and an analysis of the use of semantic hierarchies and ontologies to provide a deeper image understanding and a better image annotation in order to furnish retrieval facilities to users.