A Bayesian image annotation framework integrating search and context

Conventional approaches to image annotation tackle the problem based on the low-level visual information. Considering the importance of the information on the constrained interaction among the objects in a real world scene, contextual information has been utilized to recognize scene and object categories. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian approach to region-based image annotation, which integrates the content-based search and context into a unified framework. The content-based search selects representative keywords by matching an unlabeled image with the labeled ones followed by a weighted keyword ranking, which are in turn used by the context model to calculate the a prior probabilities of the object categories. Finally, a Bayesian framework integrates the a priori probabilities and the visual properties of image regions. The framework was evaluated using two databases and several performance measures, which demonstrated its superiority to both visual content-based and context-based approaches.