New Approaches to Automated Image Analysis

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Theo Araujo, whose focus is especially on analysing image content from social media. There are a number of API solutions now becoming available for the analysis of such images, including from Google and Microsoft. The project tested such image analysis tools in the context of the visual self-representation of companies discussing their corporate social responsibility.

Such image recognition platforms may not necessarily produce intuitive or meaningful results. The project automatically extracted the most salient labels these tools had provided for the images, and then computationally grouped these into a number of overarching topics; alternative supervised approaches were also tested. These produced mixed results, and a supervised approach turned out to be most successful. Different image analysis APIs also resulted in very different outcomes, of course.