Deep Network Personal Photo Tagging Ontology

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Solution Overview

Problem

Existing automatic photo tagging systems struggle with effectively tagging personal photos due to their semantic distribution being a subset of commercial images, with biased concepts and lower quality, making it difficult to generalize from well-labeled datasets.

Innovation Solution

A deep network is trained using stacked convolutional autoencoders and a connected top layer with a personal photo ontology, allowing for the scoring and tagging of personal photos based on metadata and semantic correlations.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Measurement precision

If conventional manual tagging is used, then tagging accuracy can be maintained, but user time and effort increase significantly

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvetagging accuracyVSAvoiduser time and effort
Core Design Contradiction:
Measurement precisionVSLoss of time

Solution Approach 1:

The system enables automatic tagging by training a deep network model that autonomously analyzes personal photos and generates tags without requiring user intervention. The model learns from the user's existing tagged photos and applies the learned patterns to automatically tag new photos, making the system self-sufficient in performing the tagging task.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #25Self-service

Solution Approach 2:

A deep network model serves as an intermediary between the user's photo collection and the tagging system. The model acts as a learned mediator that translates visual features of photos into appropriate tags based on patterns discovered during training, bridging the gap between raw images and meaningful annotations.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #24Intermediary (Mediator)

2Loss of time

If existing automatic tagging systems are used, then user time is saved, but tagging performance deteriorates on personal photos due to semantic distribution differences

Engineering Contradiction:
Improveuser timeVSAvoidtagging performance
Core Design Contradiction:
Loss of timeVSMeasurement precision

Solution Approach 1:

The system adapts the tagging model by changing its parameters through training on the user's personal photo data. Instead of using a fixed model trained on general datasets, the model's weights and features are adjusted to match the specific semantic distribution, lighting conditions, and content characteristics of personal photos, thereby improving performance.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #35Parameter changes

Solution Approach 2:

The system performs preliminary training on the user's existing tagged photos before deploying automatic tagging. This preliminary action of learning from the user's specific photo collection enables the model to understand the unique characteristics of personal photos and generalize better to unseen photos from the same collection.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #10Preliminary action

3Measurement precision

If deep network training with personal photo ontology is implemented, then tagging accuracy improves by 50%, but system complexity increases

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvetagging accuracyVSAvoidsystem complexity
Core Design Contradiction:
Measurement precisionVSDevice complexity

Solution Approach 1:

The system segments the tagging problem into distinct components: feature extraction using convolutional autoencoders, ontology-based concept representation, and score aggregation for final tagging. This segmentation allows each component to be optimized independently and simplifies the overall system architecture by breaking down the complex task into manageable modules.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #1Segmentation

Solution Approach 2:

A personal photo ontology serves as an intermediary structure that organizes concepts and relationships specific to personal photos. This ontology acts as a bridge between the deep network's feature representations and the final tags, providing a structured framework that improves accuracy while keeping the system manageable through domain-specific knowledge organization.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #24Intermediary (Mediator)

Data Source

PatentUS9754188B2Tagging personal photos with deep networks
Publication Date: 2017.09.05 MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING LLC
  • US9754188B2 patent drawing
  • US9754188B2 patent drawing
  • US9754188B2 patent drawing

AI summary

Techniques and constructs to facilitate automatic tagging can provide improvements in image storage and searching. The constructs may enable training a deep network using tagged source images and target images. The constructs may also train a top layer of the deep network using a personal photo ontology. The constructs also may select one or more concepts from the ontology for tagging personal digital images.