Semantic image annotation based on GMM and random walk model

Automatic image annotation has been an active topic of research in computer vision and patternrecognition for decades.A two stage automatic image annotation method based on Gaussian mixturemodel (GMM) and random walk model (abbreviated as GMM-RW) is presented.To start with,GMM fitted by the rival penalized expectation maximization (RPEM) algorithm is employed to estimatethe posterior probabilities of each annotation keyword.Subsequently, a random walk processover the constructed label similarity graph is implemented to further mine the potential correlations ofthe candidate annotations so as to capture the refining results, which plays a crucial role in semanticbased image retrieval.The contributions exhibited in this work are multifold.First, GMM is exploitedto capture the initial semantic annotations, especially the RPEM algorithm is utilized to train themodel that can determine the number of components in GMM automatically.Second, a label similaritygraph is constructed by a weighted linear combination of label similarity and visual similarity ofimages associated with the corresponding labels, which is able to avoid the phenomena of polysemyand synonym efficiently during the image annotation process.Third, the random walk is implementedover the constructed label graph to further refine the candidate set of annotations generated byGMM.Conducted experiments on the standard Corel5k demonstrate that GMM-RW is significantlymore effective than several state-of-the-arts regarding their effectiveness and efficiency in the task of automatic image annotation.