TSVM-HMM: Transductive SVM based hidden Markov model for automatic image annotation

Automatic image annotation (AIA) is an effective technology to improve the performance of image retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel AIA scheme based on hidden Markov model (HMM). Compared with the previous HMM-based annotation methods, SVM based semi-supervised learning, i.e. transductive SVM (TSVM), is triggered out for remarkably boosting the reliability of HMM with less users' labeling effort involved (denoted by TSVM-HMM). This guarantees that the proposed TSVM-HMM based annotation scheme integrates the discriminative classification with the generative model to mutually complete their advantages. In addition, not only the relevance model between the visual content of images and the textual keywords but also the property of keyword correlation is exploited in the proposed AIA scheme. Particularly, to establish an enhanced correlation network among keywords, both co-occurrence based and WordNet based correlation techniques are well fused and are able to be helpful for benefiting from each other. The final experimental results reveal that the better annotation performance can be achieved at less labeled training images.