Visual contextual advertising: Bringing textual advertisements to images

Advertising in the case of textual Web pages has been studied extensively by many researchers. However, with the increasing amount of multimedia data such as image, audio and video on the Web, the need for recommending advertisement for the multimedia data is becoming a reality. In this paper, we address the novel problem of visual contextual advertising, which is to directly advertise when users are viewing images which do not have any surrounding text. A key challenging issue of visual contextual advertising is that images and advertisements are usually represented in image space and word space respectively, which are quite different with each other inherently. As a result, existing methods for Web page advertising are inapplicable since they represent both Web pages and advertisement in the same word space. In order to solve the problem, we propose to exploit the social Web to link these two feature spaces together. In particular, we present a unified generative model to integrate advertisements, words and images. Specifically, our solution combines two parts in a principled approach: First, we transform images from a image feature space to a word space utilizing the knowledge from images with annotations from social Web. Then, a language model based approach is applied to estimate the relevance between transformed images and advertisements. Moreover, in this model, the probability of recommending an advertisement can be inferred efficiently given an image, which enables potential applications to online advertising.