Modeling personal and social network context for event annotation in images

This paper describes a framework to annotate images using personal and social network contexts. The problem is important as the correct context reduces the number of image annotation choices.. Social network context is useful as real-world activities of members of the social network are often correlated within a specific context. The correlation can serve as a powerful resource to effectively increase the ground truth available for annotation. There are three main contributions of this paper: (a) development of an event context framework and definition of quantitative measures for contextual correlations based on concept similarity in each facet of event context; (b) recommendation algorithms based on spreading activations that exploit personal context as well as social network context; (c) experiments on real-world, everyday images that verified both the existence of inter-user semantic disagreement and the improvement in annotation when incorporating both the user and social network context. We have conducted two user studies, and our quantitative and qualitative results indicate that context (both personal and social) facilitates effective image annotation.