The paper entitled “Annotating Images by Harnessing Worldwide User-Tagged Photos” by Xirong Li, Cees Snoek, and Marcel Worring, which will appear in the proceedings of the forthcoming ICASSP2009 conference, is available online now. Automatic image tagging is important yet challenging due to the semantic gap and the lack of learning examples to model a tag’s visual diversity. Meanwhile, social user tagging is creating rich multimedia content on the web. In this paper, we propose to combine the two tagging approaches in a search-based framework. For an unlabeled image, we first retrieve its visual neighbors from a large user-tagged image database. We then select relevant tags from the result images to annotate the unlabeled image. To tackle the unreliability and sparsity of user tagging, we introduce a joint-modality tag relevance estimation method which efficiently addresses both textual and visual clues. Experiments on 1.5 million Flickr photos and 10 000 Corel images verify the proposed method.

