Sci. & Tech.
New software advances photo search and management in online systems
Searching for digital photographs could
become easier with a Penn State-developed software system that not only
automatically tags images as they are uploaded, but also improves those
tags by "learning" from users' interactions with the system, says a
press release from EurekAlert.
"Tagging itself is challenging as it
involves converting an image's pixels to descriptive words," said James
Wang, lead researcher and associate professor of information sciences
and technology (IST). "But what is novel with the 'Tagging over Time'
or T/T technology is that the system adapts as people's preferences for
images and words change."
In other words, the system can
accommodate evolving vocabulary and interpretations to images that
people have uploaded and are uploading to systems such as Yahoo's
Flickr. This allows the T/T system's vocabulary to grow, replacing old
tags with more relevant and more specific new tags, Wang said.
In tests, the T/T technology correctly
annotated four out of every 10 images, a significant improvement over
the researchers' earlier annotation system, ALIPR or Automatic
Linguistic Indexing of Pictures-Real Time. That system offered users a
list of 15 possible annotations or words for an image-one of which was
correct for 98 percent of images tested.
"The bottom line is that the system
makes it easier to find photographs and is able to improve its
performance by itself as time passes," said Ritendra Datta, a graduate
student in computer science working with Wang. "The advancement means
time savings for consumers as well as improved searching and referral
capabilities."
The system was described in a paper,
"Tagging Over Time: Real-world Image Annotation by Lightweight
Meta-learning," presented at the recent ACM Multimedia 2007 conference
in Augsburg, Germany. The authors were Datta; Dhiraj Joshi, a former
graduate student in computer science; Jia Li, associate professor,
Department of Statistics; and Wang. Penn State has filed a provisional
patent application on this invention.
In the researchers' previous system,
pixel content of images was analyzed to suggest annotations. In the new
software, researchers have added a machine-learning component that
enables the computer to learn from the user's interactions with
photo-sharing systems.
Images of the World Trade Center, for
instance, once would have been tagged with "financial center,"
"business" or "market success." Users today, however, have different
associations or tags for the Twin Towers. The researchers' new system
has the capability to learn from such changes and reflect them
automatically in refining the old tags and generating future tags.
As the system adapts to such changes,
it also enhances tagging performance. With an initial accuracy of 40
percent, the system's precision improves over time and can reach a
level of up to 60 percent correct, Datta said.
In a companion paper, "Learning the
Consensus on Visual Quality for Next-Generation Image Management,"
which also was presented at the ACM conference, the researchers
described a new system which can automatically select "aesthetically
pleasing" images and isolate out those images of low or poor quality.
To do this, the system uses visual features such as contrast,
depth-of-field indicators, brightness and region composition from
publicly rated photographs to learn the statistical models for high-
and low-quality images.
"With this system, users can more
easily identify the best photographs in their collections," Datta said.
"The system also suggests images which should be deleted from the
digital cameras to make storage space for new photographs, for
example."
The system can also improve image
search engines by prioritizing visually pleasing images among the
search results, Wang added. The National Science Foundation supported
research on both systems.
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