Efficient and Rich Annotations for Large Photo Collections

Large unstructured photo collections from Internet usually have distinguishable keyword tagging associated with the images. Photos from tourist and heritage sites can be described with detailed and part-wise annotations resulting in an improved automatic search and enhanced photo browsing experience. Manually annotating a large community photo collection is a costly and redundant process as similar images share the same annotations. We demonstrate an interactive web-based annotation tool that allows multiple users to add, view, edit and suggest rich annotations for images in community photo collections. Since, distinct annotations could be few, we have an easy and efficient batch annotation approach using an image similarity graph, pre-computed with instance retrieval and matching. This helps in seamlessly propagating annotations of the same objects or similar images across the entire dataset. We use a database of 20 K images (Heritage-20 K) taken from a world-famous heritage site to demonstrate and evaluate our annotation approach.