Web Image Mining toward Generic Image Recognition

We describe a generic image classification system with an automatic knowledge acquisition mechanism from the Web. The processing in the system consists of three steps. In the gathering stage, the system gathers images related to given class keywords from the Web automatically. In the learning stage, it extracts image features from gathered images and associates them with each class. In the classification stage, the system classifies an unknown image into one of the classes corresponding to the class keywords by using the association between the image features and the classes.