Automatic Image Annotation for Human–Machine Interaction in Industrial IoT Flexible Manufacturing

With the explosive growth in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices, the volume of multimedia data in the field of flexible manufacturing has also increased significantly in recent years, especially the vast amount of unlabelled image data. Image annotation provides machines with a more natural way to interact with users, enhancing the level of intelligence in IIoT flexible manufacturing. This article proposes a multifeature fusion multikernel learning image annotation method to tackle imbalanced label distribution, image weak labeling, and varying representational abilities of features. Initially, oversampling techniques with synthetic minority class samples address the influence of minority classes, while a label enhancer extends label vectors to overcome the influence of weak labeling. Subsequently, the integration of traditional visual features with deep features based on multikernel learning is investigated to enhance feature representation capability. This approach combines complementary information from multiple features, establishing intrinsic connections between images and annotated keywords. Experimental evaluations are conducted on three benchmark datasets, comparing our method with several classical methods. Evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed method captures semantic information more accurately and comprehensively. By effectively accomplishing automatic image annotation, our method can enhance human-machine-interaction to improve the level of intelligence in IIoT flexible manufacturing.