Automatic image annotation for small and ad hoc intelligent applications using Raspberry Pi

The cutting-edge technology Machine Learning (ML) is successfully applied for Business Intelligence. Among the various pre-processing steps of ML, Automatic Image Annotation (also known as automatic image tagging or linguistic indexing) is the process in which a computer system automatically assigns metadata in the form of captioning or keywords to a digital image. Automatic Image Annotation (AIA) methods (which have appeared during the last several years) make a large use of many ML approaches. Clustering and classification methods are most frequently applied to annotate images. In addition, these proposed solutions require a high computational infrastructure. However, certain real-time applications (small and ad-hoc intelligent applications) for example, autonomous small robots, gadgets, drone etc. have limited computational processing capacity. These small and ad-hoc applications demand a more dynamic and portable way to automatically annotate data and then perform ML tasks (Classification, clustering etc.) in real time using limited computational power and hardware resources. Through a comprehensive literature study we found that most image pre-processing algorithms and ML tasks are computationally intensive, and it can be challenging to run them on an embedded platform with acceptable frame rates. However, Raspberry Pi is sufficient for AIA and ML tasks that are relevant to small and ad-hoc intelligent applications. In addition, few critical intelligent applications (which require high computational resources, for example, Deep Learning using huge dataset) are only feasible to run on more powerful hardware resources. In this study, we present the framework of “Automatic Image Annotation for Small and Ad-hoc Intelligent Application using Raspberry Pi” and propose the low-cost infrastructures (single node and multi node using Raspberry Pi) and software module (for Raspberry Pi) to perform AIA and ML tasks in real time for small and ad-hoc intelligent applications. The integration of both AIA and ML tasks in a single software module (with in Raspberry Pi) is challenging. This study will helpful towards the improvement in various practical applications areas relevant to small intelligent autonomous systems.

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