Combining Generative/Discriminative Learning for Automatic Image Annotation and Retrieval

In order to bridge the semantic gap exists in image retrieval, this paper propose an approach combining generative and discriminative learning to accomplish the task of automatic image annotation and retrieval. We firstly present continuous probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) to model continuous quantity. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid framework which employs continuous PLSA to model visual features of images in generative learning stage and uses ensembles of classifier chains to classify the multi-label data in discriminative learning stage. Since the framework combines the advantages of generative and discriminative learning, it can predict semantic annotation precisely for unseen images. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments on a standard Corel dataset. The experiment results show that our approach outperforms many state-of-the-art approaches.