Multi-label sparse coding for automatic image annotation

Changhu Wang, Shuicheng YAN, Lei Zhang, Hong-Jiang Zhang

Abstract: In this paper, we present a multi-label sparse coding framework for feature extraction and classification within the context of automatic image annotation. First, each image is encoded into a so-called supervector, derived from the universal Gaussian Mixture Models on orderless image patches. Then, a label sparse coding based subspace learning algorithm is derived to effectively harness multi-label information for dimensionality reduction. Finally, the sparse coding method for multi-label data is proposed to propagate the multi-labels of the training images to the query image with the sparse ℓ <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> reconstruction coefficients. Extensive image annotation experiments on the Corel5k and Corel30k databases both show the superior performance of the proposed multi-label sparse coding framework over the state-of-the-art algorithms.