Statistical correlation analysis in image retrieval

A statistical correlation model for image retrieval is proposed. This model captures the semantic relationships among images in a database from simple statistics of user-provided relevance feedback information. It is applied in the post-processing of image retrieval results such that more semantically related images are returned to the user. The algorithm is easy to implement and can be efficiently integrated into an image retrieval system to help improve the retrieval performance. Preliminary experimental results on a database of 100,000 images show that the proposed model could improve image retrieval performance for both content- and text-based queries.