Shape annotation by semi-supervised fuzzy clustering

Image annotation is an important and challenging task when managing large image collections. In this paper, a fuzzy shape annotation approach for semi-automatic image annotation is presented. A fuzzy clustering process guided by partial supervision is applied to shapes represented by Fourier descriptors in order to derive a set of shape prototypes representative of a number of semantic categories. Next, prototypes are manually annotated by attaching textual labels related to semantic categories. Based on the labeled proto-types, a new shape is automatically labeled by associating a fuzzy set that provides membership degrees of the shape to all semantic categories. The proposed annotation approach provides an innovative indexing method for shape-based image retrieval. Indeed, shape prototypes represent an inter-mediate indexing level that allows a faster retrieval process since a query is matched against prototypes, instead of the whole shape database, resulting in a speed up of the retrieval. The proposed approach is tested on synthetic and real-word images in order to show its suitability.