Enhancing semantic and geographic annotation of web images via logistic canonical correlation regression

Photo community sites such as Flickr and Picasa Web Album host a massive amount of personal photos with millions of new photos uploaded every month. These photos constitute an overwhelming source of images that require effective management. There is an increasingly imperative need for semantic annotation of these web images. This paper addresses the problem by considering two kinds of annotation: semantic annotation and geographic annotation. Both are useful for image search and retrieval and for facilitating communities and social networks. This paper proposes a novel method of Logistic Canonical Correlation Regression (LCCR) for the annotation task. This model exploits the canonical correlation between heterogeneous features and an annotation lexicon of interest, and builds a generalized annotation engine based on canonical correlations in order to produce enhanced annotation for web images. We validate the effectiveness of our algorithm using a dataset of over 380,000 images tagged with GPS coordinates.