Collaborative image retrieval via regularized metric learning

In content-based image retrieval (CBIR), relevant images are identified based on their similarities to query images. Most CBIR algorithms are hindered by the semantic gap between the low-level image features used for computing image similarity and the high-level semantic concepts conveyed in images. One way to reduce the semantic gap is to utilize the log data of users' feedback that has been collected by CBIR systems in history, which is also called “collaborative image retrieval.” In this paper, we present a novel metric learning approach, named “regularized metric learning,” for collaborative image retrieval, which learns a distance metric by exploring the correlation between low-level image features and the log data of users' relevance judgments. Compared to the previous research, a regularization mechanism is used in our algorithm to effectively prevent overfitting. Meanwhile, we formulate the proposed learning algorithm into a semidefinite programming problem, which can be solved very efficiently by existing software packages and is scalable to the size of log data. An extensive set of experiments has been conducted to show that the new algorithm can substantially improve the retrieval accuracy of a baseline CBIR system using Euclidean distance metric, even with a modest amount of log data. The experiment also indicates that the new algorithm is more effective and more efficient than two alternative algorithms, which exploit log data for image retrieval.     

一种基于记忆的图像检索相关反馈策略

相关反馈在基于内容的图像检索中成为提升检索效率的一项重要技术。然而,在图像检索中,高层语义与底层特征之间存在着巨大的"语义鸿沟",传统的相关反馈技术需要多次反馈才能获得满意结果,这使得用户的检索任务既耗时且繁琐。因此,本文通过对图像检索反馈日志信息的存储及使用过程进行分析,提出一种新的基于记忆的相关反馈策略。通过原型系统实验,与传统反馈策略相比,本文提出的策略对检索效率有明显改善。     

Image retrieval using nonlinear manifold embedding

The huge number of images on the Web gives rise to the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) as the text-based search techniques cannot cater to the needs of precisely retrieving Web images. However, CBIR comes with a fundamental flaw: the semantic gap between high-level semantic concepts and low-level visual features. Consequently, relevance feedback is introduced into CBIR to learn the subjective needs of users. However, in practical applications the limited number of user feedbacks is usually overwhelmed by the large number of dimensionalities of the visual feature space. To address this issue, a novel semi-supervised learning method for dimensionality reduction, namely kernel maximum margin projection (KMMP) is proposed in this paper based on our previous work of maximum margin projection (MMP). Unlike traditional dimensionality reduction algorithms such as principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), which only see the global Euclidean structure, KMMP is designed for discovering the local manifold structure. After projecting the images into a lower dimensional subspace, KMMP significantly improves the performance of image retrieval. The experimental results on Corel image database demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed nonlinear algorithm.     

An image retrieval system with automatic query modification

Most interactive "query-by-example" based image retrieval systems utilize relevance feedback from the user for bridging the gap between the user's implied concept and the low-level image representation in the database. However, traditional relevance feedback usage in the context of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) may not be very efficient due to a significant overhead in database search and image download time in client-server environments. In this paper, we propose a CBIR system that efficiently addresses the inherent subjectivity in user perception during a retrieval session by employing a novel idea of intra-query modification and learning. The proposed system generates an object-level view of the query image using a new color segmentation technique. Color, shape and spatial features of individual segments are used for image representation and retrieval. The proposed system automatically generates a set of modifications by manipulating the features of the query segment(s). An initial estimate of user perception is learned from the user feedback provided on the set of modified images. This largely improves the precision in the first database search itself and alleviates the overheads of database search and image download. Precision-to-recall ratio is improved in further iterations through a new relevance feedback technique that utilizes both positive as well as negative examples. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of the proposed system.     

A multiple instance learning based framework for semantic image segmentation

Most image segmentation algorithms extract regions satisfying visual uniformity criteria. Unfortunately, because of the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level semantics, such regions usually do not correspond to meaningful parts. This has motivated researchers to develop methods that, by introducing high-level knowledge into the segmentation process, can break through the performance ceiling imposed by the semantic gap. The main disadvantage of those methods is their lack of flexibility due to the assumption that such knowledge is provided in advance. In content-based image retrieval (CBIR), relevance feedback (RF) learning has been successfully applied as a technique aimed at reducing the semantic gap. Inspired by this, we present a RF-based CBIR framework that uses multiple instance learning to perform a semantically-guided context adaptation of segmentation parameters. A partial instantiation of this framework that uses mean shift-based segmentation is presented. Experiments show the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed framework on real images.     

发掘相关反馈日志中关联信息的图像检索方法

相关反馈日志蕴含着丰富的对象语义关联信息,但大多数基于内容的图像检索(CBIR)方法却缺乏对它们的重用.提出一种发掘反馈日志中图像关联信息的自动化图像检索方法,将反馈事例中图像的共生现象视为一定上下文中的图像分类.检索时,结合CBIR的检索结果和多种上下文中的图像分类实例,借鉴HITS算法的思想从中提炼图像的本质性关联,获得综合内容和语义的图像检索结果.对6万幅Corel图像数据库的实验表明,该方法可以显著改善查全率和查准率,且检索结果能够更好地满足用户的语义检索需求.     

基于贝叶斯分类器的图像检索相关反馈算法

由于图像底层特征及其本身所包含的上层语义信息的巨大差距,使得基于内容的图像检索很难取得令人满意的效果.作为一种有效的解决方案,在过去的几年中,相关反馈在该研究领域取得了一定的成功.提出了一种新的具有学习能力的反馈算法.该算法基于贝叶斯分类原理,运用不同的反馈策略分别处理正、负反馈,同时它具有学习能力,可以运用用户的反馈信息不断地修正检索参数,使系统的检索能力得到不断的提高.通过在大图片库上的检索实验 ,该算法产生的效果大大优于当前其他的反馈方法.     

A unified log-based relevance feedback scheme for image retrieval

Relevance feedback has emerged as a powerful tool to boost the retrieval performance in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). In the past, most research efforts in this field have focused on designing effective algorithms for traditional relevance feedback. Given that a CBIR system can collect and store users' relevance feedback information in a history log, an image retrieval system should be able to take advantage of the log data of users' feedback to enhance its retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for log-based relevance feedback that integrates the log of feedback data into the traditional relevance feedback schemes to learn effectively the correlation between low-level image features and high-level concepts. Given the error-prone nature of log data, we present a novel learning technique, named soft label support vector machine, to tackle the noisy data problem. Extensive experiments are designed and conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithms based on the COREL image data set. The promising experimental results validate the effectiveness of our log-based relevance feedback scheme empirically.     

图像检索中的动态相似性度量方法

为提高图像检索的效率,近年来相关反馈机制被引入到了基于内容的图像检索领域。该文提出了一种新的相关反馈方法－－动态相似性度量方法。该方法建立在目前被广泛采用的图像相拟性度量方法的基础上,结合了相关反馈图像检索系统的时序特性,通过捕获用户的交互信息,动态地修正图像的相似性度量公式,从而把用户模型嵌入到了图像检索系统,在某种程度上使图像检索结果与人的主观感知更加接近。实验结果表明该方法的性能明显优于其它图像检索系统所采用的方法。     

Neighborhood preserving regression for image retrieval

In content-based image retrieval (CBIR), relevance feedback has been proven to be a powerful tool for bridging the gap between low level visual features and high level semantic concepts. Traditionally, relevance feedback driven CBIR is often considered as a supervised learning problem where the user provided feedbacks are used to learn a distance metric or classification function. However, CBIR is intrinsically a semi-supervised learning problem in which the testing samples (images in the database) are present during the learning process. Moreover, when there are no sufficient feedbacks, these methods may suffer from the overfitting problem. In this paper, we propose a novel neighborhood preserving regression algorithm which makes efficient use of both labeled and unlabeled images. By using the unlabeled images, the geometrical structure of the image space can be incorporated into the learning system through a regularizer. Specifically, from all the functions which minimize the empirical loss on the labeled images, we select the one which best preserves the local neighborhood structure of the image space. In this way, our method can obtain a regression function which respects both semantic and geometrical structures of the image database. We present experimental evidence suggesting that our algorithm is able to use unlabeled data effectively for image retrieval.     

A scalable approach for content based image retrieval in cloud datacenter

The emergence of cloud datacenters enhances the capability of online data storage. Since massive data is stored in datacenters, it is necessary to effectively locate and access interest data in such a distributed system. However, traditional search techniques only allow users to search images over exact-match keywords through a centralized index. These techniques cannot satisfy the requirements of content based image retrieval (CBIR). In this paper, we propose a scalable image retrieval framework which can efficiently support content similarity search and semantic search in the distributed environment. Its key idea is to integrate image feature vectors into distributed hash tables (DHTs) by exploiting the property of locality sensitive hashing (LSH). Thus, images with similar content are most likely gathered into the same node without the knowledge of any global information. For searching semantically close images, the relevance feedback is adopted in our system to overcome the gap between low-level features and high-level features. We show that our approach yields high recall rate with good load balance and only requires a few number of hops.     

Joint semantics and feature based image retrieval using relevance feedback

Relevance feedback is a powerful technique for image retrieval and has been an active research direction for the past few years. Various ad hoc parameter estimation techniques have been proposed for relevance feedback. In addition, methods that perform optimization on multilevel image content model have been formulated. However, these methods only perform relevance feedback on low-level image features and fail to address the images' semantic content. In this paper, we propose a relevance feedback framework to take advantage of the semantic contents of images in addition to low-level features. By forming a semantic network on top of the keyword association on the images, we are able to accurately deduce and utilize the images' semantic contents for retrieval purposes. We also propose a ranking measure that is suitable for our framework. The accuracy and effectiveness of our method is demonstrated with experimental results on real-world image collections.     

Integrated probability function and its application to content-based image retrieval by relevance feedback

In the last few years, we have seen an upsurge of interest in content-based image retrieval (CBIR)—the selection of images from a collection via features extracted from images themselves. Often, a single image attribute may not have enough discriminative information for successful retrieval. On the other hand when multiple features are used, it is hard to determine the suitable weighing factors for various features for optimal retrieval. In this paper, we present a relevance feedback framework with Integrated Probability Function (IPF) which combines multiple features for optimal retrieval. The IPF is based on a new posterior probability estimator and a novel weight updating approach. We perform experiments on 1400 monochromatic trademark images have been performed. The proposed IPF is shown to be more effective and efficient to retrieve deformed trademark images than the commonly used integrated dissimilarity function. The new posterior probability estimator is shown to be generally better than the existing one. The proposed novel weight updating approach by relevance feedback is shown to be better than both the existing scoring approach and the existing ratio approach. In experiments, 95% of the targets are ranked at the top five positions. By two iterations of relevance feedback, retrieval performance can be improved from 75% to over 95%. The IPF and its relevance feedback framework proposed in this paper can be effectively and efficiently used in content-based image retrieval.     

一种基于内容的图像检索界面

基于内容和对象的图像压缩和检索是下一代的图像处理技术,具有较广阔的应用前景。目前该领域的研究主要从设计方便、快捷的用户查询界面和发展图像数据库检索技术两方面展开。为此,该文提出了一种基于内容的图像检索用户界面的设计方法来满足用户复杂的检索要求。在图像的检索过程中,通过用户组合图标的方法来描述检索要求,同时将图像的颜色和空间信息相结合进行图像查询,并借助用户的反馈信息实现系统的自学习功能,最终逐步提高系统图像检索的速度和准确性。     

Complementary relevance feedback-based content-based image retrieval

We propose a complementary relevance feedback-based content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system. This system exploits the synergism between short-term and long-term learning techniques to improve the retrieval performance. Specifically, we construct an adaptive semantic repository in long-term learning to store retrieval patterns of historical query sessions. We then extract high-level semantic features from the semantic repository and seamlessly integrate low-level visual features and high-level semantic features in short-term learning to effectively represent the query in a single retrieval session. The high-level semantic features are dynamically updated based on users’ query concept and therefore represent the image’s semantic concept more accurately. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms its seven state-of-the-art peer systems in terms of retrieval precision and storage space on a large scale imagery database.     

Hidden annotation for image retrieval with long-term relevance feedback learning

Hidden annotation (HA) is an important research issue in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). We propose to incorporate long-term relevance feedback (LRF) with HA to increase both efficiency and retrieval accuracy of CBIR systems. The work contains two parts. (1) Through LRF, a multi-layer semantic representation is built to automatically extract hidden semantic concepts underlying images. HA with these concepts alleviates the burden of manual annotation and avoids the ambiguity problem of keyword-based annotation. (2) For each learned concept, semi-supervised learning is incorporated to automatically select a small number of candidate images for annotators to annotate, which improves efficiency of HA.     

Vector space model adaptation and pseudo relevance feedback for content-based image retrieval

Image retrieval is an important problem for researchers in computer vision and content-based image retrieval (CBIR) fields. Over the last decades, many image retrieval systems were based on image representation as a set of extracted low-level features such as color, texture and shape. Then, systems calculate similarity metrics between features in order to find similar images to a query image. The disadvantage of this approach is that images visually and semantically different may be similar in the low level feature space. So, it is necessary to develop tools to optimize retrieval of information. Integration of vector space models is one solution to improve the performance of image retrieval. In this paper, we present an efficient and effective retrieval framework which includes a vectorization technique combined with a pseudo relevance model. The idea is to transform any similarity matching model (between images) to a vector space model providing a score. A study on several methodologies to obtain the vectorization is presented. Some experiments have been undertaken on Wang, Oxford5k and Inria Holidays datasets to show the performance of our proposed framework.     

图像检索中一种支持多例查询的新方法

基于内容的图像检索的关键问题之一是高层语义和低层图像特征之间的差异,相关反馈技术是缩短这个"语义鸿沟"的有效方法。本文提出了一种新的相关反馈算法,通过分析正例图像在特征空间中的散布来构造该类图像的投影空间,该空间对应于一个语义类在特征空间中分布密集的子空间,在投影空间中计算相似图像。同时根据每次反馈的信息不断修正投影空间来提高系统的检索性能。在Corel大图像库中的实验结果表明,该算法对多例图像查询有较好的检索效果。