Tag suggestr: Automatic photo tag expansion using visual information for photo sharing websites

In this paper, we propose an automatic photo tag expansion system for the community photo collections, such as Flickr. Our aim is to suggest relevant tags for a target photograph uploaded to the system by a user, by incorporating the visual and textual cues from other related photographs. As the first step, the system requires the user to add only a few initial tags for each uploaded photo. These initial tags are used to retrieve related photos including the same tags in their tag lists. Then the set of candidate tags collected from a large pool of photos is weighted according to the similarity of the target photo to the retrieved photo including the tag. Finally, the tags in the highest rankings are used to automatically expand the tags of the target photo. The experimental results on Flickr photos show that, the use of visual similarity of semantically relevant photos to recommend tags improves the quality of suggested tags compared to only text-based systems. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.