Automatic image annotation via the statistical semantic model based on the relationship between the regions

This paper presents a model, which combines visual topics and regional contexts to automatic image annotation. Regional contexts model the relationship between the regions, whereas visual topics provide the global distribution of topics over an image. Previous image annotation methods neglected the relationship between the regions in an image, while these regions are exactly explanation of the image semantics, therefore considering the relationship between them are helpful to annotate the images. The proposed model extracts regional contexts and visual topics from the image, and incorporates them by estimating their joint probability. Regional contexts and visual topics are learned by PLSA (Probability Latent Semantic Analysis) from the training data. The experiments on 5k Corel images show that integrating these two kinds of information is beneficial to image annotation.