Stanford Building Stories from Pictures

This was a sub problem solution we needed for an expert system that worked with archives of advertising copy.  Later I worked with a startup that aimed to classify photographs for their potential use in Ads.   Good progress in this space.

Stanford team creates computer vision algorithm that can describe photos
Computers only recently began to get the software needed to discern unknown objects; now machine-learning takes computer vision to the next level with a system that can describe objects and put them into context. Coming soon, better visual search?

Stanford Professor Fei-Fei Li, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, leads work on a computer vision system. ... Computer software only recently became smart enough to recognize objects in photographs. Now, Stanford researchers using machine learning have created a system that takes the next step, writing a simple story of what's happening in any digital image. ... " 

Update:  Here is a link to Google's work on image scene description.