Semantic categorization of digital home photo using photographic region templates

In this paper, a semantic categorization method in generic home photos is proposed. In recent years, the semantic categorization of image has been a challenge due to the proliferation of digital home photos. Our approach is to detect semantically meaningful concepts contained in a photo. The proposed method incorporates an intermediate level of concepts, called local concept, so that it catches well semantic meaning of local regions of image as bridging the semantic gap of the low-level features and high-level category concepts. To detect the local concepts from the home photo, region segmentation by photographic region template and concept merging is also proposed. The efficacy of the proposed semantic categorization method was demonstrated with 3828 general home photos. The experiment results showed the proposed categorization method would be useful to detect multiple semantic meaning of the home photos. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.