  Not all tags are relevant to an image, and the number of relevant tags is
image-dependent. Although many methods have been proposed for image
auto-annotation, the question of how to determine the number of tags to be
selected per image remains open. The main challenge is that for a large tag
vocabulary, there is often a lack of ground truth data for acquiring optimal
cutoff thresholds per tag. In contrast to previous works that pre-specify the
number of tags to be selected, we propose in this paper adaptive tag selection.
The key insight is to divide the vocabulary into two disjoint subsets, namely a
seen set consisting of tags having ground truth available for optimizing their
thresholds and a novel set consisting of tags without any ground truth. Such a
division allows us to estimate how many tags shall be selected from the novel
set according to the tags that have been selected from the seen set. The
effectiveness of the proposed method is justified by our participation in the
ImageCLEF 2014 image annotation task. On a set of 2,065 test images with ground
truth available for 207 tags, the benchmark evaluation shows that compared to
the popular top-$k$ strategy which obtains an F-score of 0.122, adaptive tag
selection achieves a higher F-score of 0.223. Moreover, by treating the
underlying image annotation system as a black box, the new method can be used
as an easy plug-in to boost the performance of existing systems.
