Visualizing Image Query Senses by Social Tags

In this paper, we present an approach for visualizing image query senses. Image queries usually have several senses, which can describe the meanings of themselves. However, senses like ‘hot’ might not be concrete, thus we need to find out visual concepts to visualize these image query senses. We propose a novel approach to discover the visual concepts for image queries based on several statistical scores and social tags from Flickr, and further help improve image search by visualizing their senses. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we test the found concepts on real world queries and images. Both the experimental results, conducted for image retrieval and concepts evaluation, demonstrate that the approach can substantially improve the traditional image search engine, which retrieve only relevant images, and show that the visual concepts for image query senses can be utilized to enhance the effectiveness of image retrieval.