Location-Based Parallel Tag Completion for Geo-Tagged Social Image Retrieval

Having benefited from tremendous growth of user-generated content, social annotated tags get higher importance in the organization and retrieval of large-scale image databases on Online Sharing Websites (OSW). To obtain high-quality tags from existing community contributed tags with missing information and noise, tag-based annotation or recommendation methods have been proposed for performance promotion of tag prediction. While images from OSW contain rich social attributes, they have not taken full advantage of rich social attributes and auxiliary information associated with social images to construct global information completion models. In this article, beyond the image-tag relation, we take full advantage of the ubiquitous GPS locations and image-user relationship to enhance the accuracy of tag prediction and improve the computational efficiency. For GPS locations, we define the popular geo-locations where people tend to take more images as Points of Interests (POI), which are discovered by mean shift approach. For image-user relationship, we integrate a localized prior constraint, expecting the completed tag sub-matrix in each POI to maintain consistency with users’ tagging behaviors. Based on these two key issues, we propose a unified tag matrix completion framework, which learns the image-tag relation within each POI. To solve the optimization problem, an efficient proximal sub-gradient descent algorithm is designed. The model optimization can be easily parallelized and distributed to learn the tag sub-matrix for each POI. Extensive experimental results reveal that the learned tag sub-matrix of each POI reflects the major trend of users’ tagging results with respect to different POIs and users, and the parallel learning process provides strong support for processing large-scale online image databases. To fit the response time requirement and storage limitations of Tag-based Image Retrieval (TBIR) on mobile devices, we introduce Asymmetric Locality Sensitive Hashing (ALSH) to reduce the time cost and meanwhile improve the efficiency of retrieval.