Image tag refinement by regularized latent Dirichlet allocation

Tagging is nowadays the most prevalent and practical way to make images searchable. However, in reality many manually-assigned tags are irrelevant to image content and hence are not reliable for applications. A lot of recent efforts have been conducted to refine image tags. In this paper, we propose to do tag refinement from the angle of topic modeling and present a novel graphical model, regularized latent Dirichlet allocation (rLDA). In the proposed approach, tag similarity and tag relevance are jointly estimated in an iterative manner, so that they can benefit from each other, and the multi-wise relationships among tags are explored. Moreover, both the statistics of tags and visual affinities of images in the corpus are explored to help topic modeling. We also analyze the superiority of our approach from the deep structure perspective. The experiments on tag ranking and image retrieval demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.