An efficient manual image annotation approach based on tagging and browsing

Abstract

This paper investigates new approaches to improve the efficiency of manual image annotation and help users to produce better annotation results in a given amount of time. Although important in practice, this issue has rarely been studied in a quantitative way before. To achieve this, we first propose two time models to analyze the annotation process for two popular manual annotation approaches, i.e., tagging and browsing. The complementary properties of these approaches have inspired us to merge them to develop a hybrid annotation algorithms called frequency-based annotation. Our experiments on large-scale multimedia collections have shown that the proposed algorithm can achieve an up to 40% annotation time reduction compared with the baseline methods. In other words, it can produce considerably better results using the same annotation time. Copyright 2007 ACM.