Harvesting Deep Models for Cross-Lingual Image Annotation

This paper considers cross-lingual image annotation, harvesting deep visual models from one language to annotate images with labels from another language. This task cannot be accomplished by machine translation, as labels can be ambiguous and a translated vocabulary leaves us limited freedom to annotate images with appropriate labels. Given non-overlapping vocabularies between two languages, we formulate cross-lingual image annotation as a zero-shot learning problem. For cross-lingual label matching, we adapt zero-shot by replacing the current monolingual semantic embedding space by a bilingual alternative. In order to reduce both label ambiguity and redundancy we propose a simple yet effective approach called label-enhanced zero-shot learning. Using three state-of-the-art deep visual models, i.e., ResNet-152, GoogleNet-Shuffle and OpenImages, experiments on the test set of Flickr8k-CN demonstrate the viability of the proposed approach for cross-lingual image annotation.