Collaborative Similarity Metric Learning for Semantic Image Annotation and Retrieval

Automatic image annotation has become an increasingly important research topic owing to its key role in image retrieval. Simultaneously, it is highly challenging when facing to large-scale dataset with large variance. Practical approaches generally rely on similarity measures defined over images and multi-label prediction methods. More specifically, those approaches usually 1) leverage similarity measures predefined or learned by optimizing for ranking or annotation, which might be not adaptive enough to datasets; and 2) predict labels separately without taking the correlation of labels into account. In this paper, we propose a method for image annotation through collaborative similarity metric learning from dataset and modeling the label correlation of the dataset. The similarity metric is learned by simultaneously optimizing the 1) image ranking using structural SVM (SSVM), and 2) image annotation using correlated label propagation, with respect to the similarity metric. The learned similarity metric, fully exploiting the available information of datasets, would improve the two collaborative components, ranking and annotation, and sequentially the retrieval system itself. We evaluated the proposed method on Corel5k, Corel30k and EspGame databases. The results for annotation and retrieval show the competitive performance of the proposed method.