Cooperative classification of shared images

We propose a method the for semi-automatic organization of photo albums. The method analyzes how different users organize their own pictures. The goal is to help the user in dividing his pictures into groups characterized by a similar semantic content. The method is semi-automatic: the user starts to assign labels to the pictures and unlabeled pictures are tagged with proposed labels. The user can accept the recommendation or made a correction. We use a suitable feature representation of the images to model the different classes that the users have collected. Then, we look for correspondences between the criteria used by the different users which are integrated using boosting. A quantitative evaluation of the proposed approach is obtained by simulating the amount of user interaction needed to annotate the albums of a set of members of the flickr R(trademark) photo-sharing community. © 2010 Copyright SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering.