Imagination: Accurate Image Annotation Using Link-analysis Techniques

The advent of digital photography calls for effective techniques for managing growing amounts of color images. Even if the content-based approach represents a completely automatic solution to image retrieval, it partially fails due to the semantic gap existing between the user subjective notion of similarity and the one of a feature-based retrieval system. A possible way to fill such gap is to (semi-)automatically assign meaningful terms to images, so as to enable a high-level, concept-based, retrieval. In this paper we explore the opportunities offered by graph-based link analysis techniques in the development of a semi-automatic image captioning system. The approach we propose is appealing since predicted terms for an image: 1) are in variable number, depending on the image content, 2) represent correlated terms, and 3) can also represent abstract concepts. We present preliminary results on our prototype system and discuss possible extensions.