A Text-Based Approach to the ImageCLEF 2010 Photo Annotation Task

The challenges of searching the increasingly large collections of digital images which are appearing in many places mean that automated annotation of images is becoming an important technology. We describe our participation in the ImageCLEF 2010 Visual Concept Detection and Annotation Task. Our approach used only the textual features (Flickr user tags and EXIF information) provided with the images to perform automatic annotation. Our method explores the use of a combination of techniques to address the annotation problem. Our results indicate that the techniques works reasonably given the limitations inherent in using only textual data for this task. We identify the drawbacks of our approach and how these might be addressed and optimized in further work.