Images uploaded to photo sharing websites often include some tags or sentence descriptions. In an example embodiment, these tags or descriptions, which might be relevant to the image contents, become the weak labels of these images. The weak labels can be used to identify concepts for the images using an iterative hard instance learning algorithm to discover visual concepts from the label and visual feature representations in the weakly labeled images. The visual concept detectors can be directly applied to concept recognition and detection.
Discovering visual concepts from weakly labeled image collections