Software Learns to Tag Photos

U.S. researchers have released a new online program for automatically tagging images according to their content. In its first real-world test, the program processed thousands of publicly accessible images available on the photo-sharing site Flickr. At least one accurate tag was generated for 98 percent of all the pictures analysed. The new software, called ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures), uses a combination of statistical techniques to process an image and assign it a batch of 15 words, arranged in order of perceived relevance. These words may refer to a specific object within the picture, such as a "person" or "car," or to a more general theme, such as "outdoors" or "manmade."