Probabilistic Inference over Image Networks

Digital Libraries contain collections of multimedia objects providing services for the management, sharing and retrieval. Involved objects have two levels of complexity: the former refers to the inner object complexity while the latter takes into account the implicit/explicit relationships among objects. Traditional machine learning classifiers do not consider the relationships among objects assuming them independent and identically distributed. Recently,

link-based

classification methods have been proposed, that try to classify objects exploiting their relationships (links). In this paper, we deal with objects corresponding to digital images, even if the proposed approach can be naturally applied to different kind of multimedia objects. Relationships can be expressed among the features of the same image or among features belonging to different images. The aim of this work is to verify whether a link-based classifier based on a Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) language can improve the accuracy of a classical k-nearest neighbour approach. Experiments will show that the modelling of the relationships in a real-word dataset using a SRL model reduces the classification error.