Automatic image annotation has been an active topic of research in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition for decades. In this paper, we present a new method for automatic image annotation based on Gaussian mixture model (GMM) considering cross-modal correlations. To be specific, we first employ GMM fitted by the rival penalized expectation-maximization (RPEM) algorithm to estimate the posterior probabilities of each annotation keyword. Next, a label similarity graph is constructed by a weighted linear combination of label similarity and visual similarity by seamlessly integrating the information from both image low level visual features and high level semantic concepts together, which can effectively avoid the phenomenon that different images with the same candidate annotations would obtain the same refinement results. Followed by the rank-two relaxation heuristics over the built label similarity graph is applied to further mine the correlation of the candidate annotations so as to capture the refining annotation results, which plays a crucial role in the semantic based image retrieval. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: (1) Exploiting GMM that is trained by the RPEM algorithm to capture the initial semantic annotations of images. (2) The label similarity graph is constructed by a weighted linear combination of label similarity and visual similarity of images associated with the corresponding labels. (3) Refining the candidate set of annotations generated by the GMM through solving the max-bisection based on the rank-two relaxation algorithm over the weighted label graph. Compared to the current competitive model SGMM-RW, we can achieve significant improvements of 4% and 5% in precision, 6% and 9% in recall on the Corel5k and Mirflickr25k, respectively. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.