Patent ID: 8571850

Claim:
A method comprising: for each word v of a lexicon V: obtaining a word-to-word correlation between a candidate word w and each word v in the lexicon V measured by P(w|v) which comprises a conditional probability of the candidate word w given the word v; and obtaining a word-to-image correlation between the word v and a target image I u independently of a training set of images, based at least on an image representation of the word v that is developed through an analysis of one or more top ranked images obtained by an image search engine searching on the word v, the word-to-image correlation between each word v in the lexicon V and the target image I u measured by P(I u |v) which comprises a conditional probability of the target image I u given the word v; determining a value of a collective word-to-image correlation between the candidate word w and the target image I u based on the word-to-word correlations between the candidate word w and each word v in the lexicon V and the word-to-image correlations between each word v in the lexicon V and the target image I u ; and annotating the target image I u using the candidate word w if the collective word-to-image correlation between the candidate word w and the target image I u satisfies a preset condition, the value of the collective word-to-image correlation between the candidate word w and the target image I u calculated using: w * = arg ⁢ ⁢ max w ⋐ V ⁢ ∑ v ∈ V ⁢ ⁢ P ⁡ ( I u | v ) ⁢ P ⁡ ( w | v ) ⁢ P ⁡ ( v ) , wherein P(v) is a measure of at least one of an importance or a popularity of the word v in the lexicon V.