MAP-based image tag recommendation using a visual folksonomy

Descriptive tags are needed to enable efficient and effective search in vast collections of images. Tag recommendation represents a trade-off between automatic image annotation techniques and manual tagging. In this letter, we formulate image tag recommendation as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem, making use of a visual folksonomy. A folksonomy can be seen as a collaboratively created set of metadata for informal social classification. Our experimental results show that the use of a visual folksonomy for image tag recommendation has two significant benefits, compared to a conventional approach using a limited concept vocabulary. First, our tag recommendation technique can make use of an unrestricted and rich concept vocabulary. Second, our approach is able to recommend a higher number of correct tags. (c) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.