We propose a method to improve the results of image search engines on the Internet to satisfy users who desire

Abstract. In this paper, we propose an automatic photo tag expansion system for the community photo collections, such as Flickr 1 . Our aim is to suggest relevant tags for a target photograph uploaded to the system by a user, by incorporating the visual and textual cues from other related photographs. As the first step, the system requires the user to add only a few initial tags for each uploaded photo. These initial tags are used to retrieve related photos including the same tags in their tag lists. Then the set of candidate tags collected from a large pool of photos is weighted according to the similarity of the target photo to the retrieved photo including the tag. Finally, the tags in the highest rankings are used to automatically expand the tags of the target photo. The experimental results on Flickr photos show that, the use of visual similarity of semantically relevant photos to recommend tags improves the quality of suggested tags compared to only text-based systems.

In this paper we present an automatic photo tag expansion method designed for photo sharing websites. The purpose of the method is to suggest tags that are relevant to the visual content of a given photo at upload time. Both textual and visual cues are used in the process of tag expansion. When a photo is to be uploaded, the system asks for a couple of initial tags from the user. The initial tags are used to retrieve relevant photos together with their tags. These photos are assumed to be potentially content related to the uploaded target photo. The tag sets of the relevant photos are used to form the candidate tag list, and visual similarities between the target photo and relevant photos are used to give weights to these candidate tags. Tags with the highest weights are suggested to the user. The method is applied on Flickr (http://www.flickr. com ). Results show that including visual information in the process of photo tagging increases accuracy with respect to text-based methods. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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