Sahbi, H.Li, X.2011-08-102011-08-102010Computer Vision - ACCV 2010: Proceedings of 10th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, held in Queenstown, New Zealand, Nov 8-12 2010, revised selected papers, part 1 / R. Kimmel, R. Klette and A. Sugimoto (eds.): pp.214-22797836421931490302-97431611-3349http://hdl.handle.net/2440/65345We introduce in this paper a novel image annotation approach based on support vector machines (SVMs) and a new class of kernels referred to as context-dependent. The method goes beyond the naive use of the intrinsic low level features (such as color, texture, shape, etc.) and context-free kernels, in order to design a kernel function applicable to interconnected databases such as social networks. The main contribution of our method includes (i) a variational approach which helps designing this function using both intrinsic features and the underlying contextual information resulting from different links and (ii) the proof of convergence of our kernel to a positive definite fixed-point, usable for SVM training and other kernel methods. When plugged in SVMs, our context-dependent kernel consistently improves the performance of image annotation, compared to context-free kernels, on hundreds of thousands of Flickr images.enCopyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011Conference paper002010538210.1007/978-3-642-19315-6_172-s2.0-7995250397031214