A unified learning framework for auto face annotation by mining web facial images

Auto face annotation plays an important role in many real-world multimedia information and knowledge management systems. Recently there is a surge of research interests in mining weakly-labeled facial images on the internet to tackle this long-standing research challenge in computer vision and image understanding. In this paper, we present a novel unified learning framework for face annotation by mining weakly labeled web facial images through interdisciplinary efforts of combining sparse feature representation, content-based image retrieval, transductive learning and inductive learning techniques. In particular, we first introduce a new search-based face annotation paradigm using transductive learning, and then propose an effective inductive learning scheme for training classification-based annotators from weakly labeled facial images, and finally unify both transductive and inductive learning approaches to maximize the learning efficacy. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world web facial image database, in which encouraging results show that the proposed unified learning scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.