Event recognition in photo albums using probabilistic graphical models and feature relevance

This paper proposes a method for event recognition in photo albums which aims at predicting the event categories of groups of photos. We propose a probabilistic graphical model (PGM) for event prediction based on high-level visual features consisting of objects and scenes, which are extracted directly from images. For better discrimination between different event categories, we develop a scheme to integrate feature relevance in our model which yields a more powerful inference when album images exhibit a large number of objects and scenes. It allows also to mitigate the influence of non-informative images usually contained in the albums. The performance of the proposed method is validated using extensive experiments on the recently-proposed PEC dataset containing over 61 000 images. Our method obtained the highest accuracy which outperforms previous work.