Improving image tags by exploiting web search results

Automatic image tagging automatically assigns image with semantic key words called tags, which significantly facilitates image search and organization. Most of present image tagging approaches are constrained by the training model learned from the training dataset, and moreover they have no exploitation on other type of web resource (e.g., web text documents). In this paper, we proposed a search based image tagging algorithm (CTSTag), in which the result tags are derived from web search result. Specifically, it assigns the query image with a more comprehensive tag set derived from both web images and web text documents. First, a content-based image search technology is used to retrieve a set of visually similar images which are ranked by the semantic consistency values. Then, a set of relevant tags are derived from these top ranked images as the initial tag set. Second, a text-based search is used to retrieve other relevant web resources by using the initial tag set as the query. After the denoising process, the initial tag set is expanded with other tags mined from the text-based search result. Then, an probability flow measure method is proposed to estimate the probabilities of the expanded tags. Finally, all the tags are refined using the Random Walk with Restart (RWR) method and the top ones are assigned to the query images. Experiments on NUS-WIDE dataset show not only the performance of the proposed algorithm but also the advantage of image retrieval and organization based on the result tags.