Identifying Tags Describing Image Contents

On many photo-sharing social media, e.g., Instagram, a user posting a photo can add tags, i.e., words describing it. Tags are used for keyword-based image search. Some tags, however, describe not image contents but some metadata, e.g., camera names. We propose a method of determining which tag is more likely to describe the associated image contents. We determine it based on pairwise comparisons of tags. Given a pair of tags A and B, we compare three sets of images: (1) those associated with A, (2) those associated with B, and (3) those associated with both A and B. If (3) is more similar to (1) than to (2), A is more likely to describe image contents. Our experiment with Instagram data shows that our method is effective.