Folksonomy-Based Visual Ontology Construction and Its Applications

An ontology hierarchically encodes concepts and concept relationships, and has a variety of applications such as semantic understanding and information retrieval. Previous work for building ontologies has primarily relied on labor-intensive human contributions or focused on text-based extraction. In this paper, we consider the problem of automatically constructing a folksonomy-based visual ontology (FBVO) from the user-generated annotated images. A systematic framework is proposed consisting of three stages as concept discovery, concept relationship extraction, and concept hierarchy construction. The noisy issues of the user-generated tags are carefully addressed to guarantee the quality of derived FBVO. The constructed FBVO finally consists of 139 825 concept nodes and millions of concept relationships by mining more than 2.4 million Flickr images. Experimental evaluations show that the derived FBVO is of high quality and consistent with human perception. We further demonstrate the utility of the derived FBVO in applications of complex visual recognition and exploratory image search.