A survey on automatic image annotation

Today, with the development of technologies to capture and share images, the number of digital images has increased significantly. The management of this volume of images requires an efficient system to review, classify, search and retrieve the images.New generations of image retrieval systems usually take one or a few keywords from the user to retrieve images with visual content related to that keywords. A mechanism that can automatically describe the content of an image (like a human) can increase the efficiency of these systems.Automatic Image Annotation or AIA is a professional method to express the content of images by keywords or tags. AIA systems, investigate the relationship between the meaning of a text and low-level image features by using machine learning techniques. They automatically assign some tags to images to facilitate fast search based on image contents.In this paper, we explain the different steps to implement an AIA system, review the related works and express the problems and challenges in designing such systems. We also introduce several datasets suitable for AIA systems.