一种基于近邻保留的相关反馈图像检索算法

图像检索中很多时候会出现相关反馈提供的标注样本数不足,从而导致监督学习方法面临过适应问题的困扰。提出一种能有效使用未标记数据的半监督新型算法:近邻保留回归算法,它通过使已标记数据的观测误差函数最小化,来选择综合性能最好的回归函数,以兼顾图像的语义特征及图像空间的几何结构,并解决过适应问题。实验结果证明,算法能有效提高图像检索系统的性能。     

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.     

A novel relevance feedback method for CBIR

In this paper, we address the challenge about insufficiency of training set and limited feedback information in each relevance feedback (RF) round during the process of content based image retrieval (CBIR). We propose a novel active learning scheme to utilize the labeled and unlabeled images to build the initial Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for image retrieving. In our framework, two main components, a pseudo-label strategy and an improved active learning selection method, are included. Moreover, a feature subspace partition algorithm is proposed to model the retrieval target from users by the analysis from relevance labeled images. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method on a range of databases with respect to the retrieval accuracy.     

基于内容的图象检索技术

随着数字图象的日益增多,基于内容的图象检索已成为图象使用者和管理者迫切需要解决的问题,近年来,各国研究者纷纷加入该领域的研究.为了使人们对该领域现状有个概略了解,以推动该领域研究进一步开展,首先概括介绍了基于内容图象检索的产生、发展及其关键技术;然后介绍了特征提取(包括低层特征和语义特征)及其相似性计算、相关反馈等的原理及算法;最后指出了基于内容的图象检索技术与计算机视觉技术的区别所在,并对目前存在的问题和应着重的研究内容以及发展方向进行了分析.     

Learning a Maximum Margin Subspace for Image Retrieval

One of the fundamental problems in Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has been the gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic concepts. To narrow down this gap, relevance feedback is introduced into image retrieval. With the user-provided information, a classifier can be learned to distinguish between positive and negative examples. However, in real-world applications, the number of user feedbacks is usually too small compared to the dimensionality of the image space. In order to cope with the high dimensionality, we propose a novel semisupervised method for dimensionality reduction called Maximum Margin Projection (MMP). MMP aims at maximizing the margin between positive and negative examples at each local neighborhood. Different from traditional dimensionality reduction algorithms such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), which effectively see only the global euclidean structure, MMP is designed for discovering the local manifold structure. Therefore, MMP is likely to be more suitable for image retrieval, where nearest neighbor search is usually involved. After projecting the images into a lower dimensional subspace, the relevant images get closer to the query image; thus, the retrieval performance can be enhanced. The experimental results on Corel image database demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.     

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.     

Relevance Feedback and Learning in Content-Based Image Search

A major bottleneck in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems or search engines is the large gap between low-level image features used to index images and high-level semantic contents of images. One solution to this bottleneck is to apply relevance feedback to refine the query or similarity measures in image search process. In this paper, we first address the key issues involved in relevance feedback of CBIR systems and present a brief overview of a set of commonly used relevance feedback algorithms. Almost all of the previously proposed methods fall well into such framework. We present a framework of relevance feedback and semantic learning in CBIR. In this framework, low-level features and keyword annotations are integrated in image retrieval and in feedback processes to improve the retrieval performance. We have also extended framework to a content-based web image search engine in which hosting web pages are used to collect relevant annotations for images and users' feedback logs are used to refine annotations. A prototype system has developed to evaluate our proposed schemes, and our experimental results indicated that our approach outperforms traditional CBIR system and relevance feedback approaches.     

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.     

基于半监督线性近邻传递的相关反馈方法

提出了一种半监督线性近邻传递的相关反馈方法FSLNP(feedback semi-supervised linear neighborhood propagation).该算法不仅能够保持正、负例约束信息,而且能够保持图的局部以及全局相关性结构信息.采用相关反馈的有标签和未知标签图像点,找到比较好的表示图像相关性的一个...     

HBIR: Hypercube-Based Image Retrieval

In this paper, we propose a mapping from low level feature space to the semantic space drawn by the users through relevance feedback to enhance the performance of current content based image retrieval (CBIR) systems. The proposed approach makes a rule base for its inference and configures it using the feedbacks gathered from users during the life cycle of the system. Each rule makes a hypercube (HC) in the feature space corresponding to a semantic concept in the semantic space. Both short and long term strategies are taken to improve the accuracy of the system in response to each feedback of the user and gradually bridge the semantic gap. A scoring paradigm is designed to determine the effective rules and suppress the inefficient ones. For improving the response time, an HC merging approach and, for reducing the conflicts, an HC splitting method is designed. Our experiments on a set of 11000 images from the Corel database show that the proposed approach can better describe the semantic content of images for image retrieval with respect to some existing approaches reported recently in the literature. Moreover, our approach can be better trained and is not saturated in long time, i.e., any feedback improves the precision and recall of the system. Another strength of our method is its ability to address the dynamic nature of the image database such that it can follow the changes occurred instantaneously and permanently by adding and dropping images.     

Image retrieval based on incremental subspace learning

Many problems in information processing involve some form of dimensionality reduction, such as face recognition, image/text retrieval, data visualization, etc. The typical linear dimensionality reduction algorithms include principal component analysis (PCA), random projection, locality-preserving projection (LPP), etc. These techniques are generally unsupervised which allows them to model data in the absence of labels or categories. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised subspace learning algorithm for image retrieval. In relevance feedback-driven image retrieval system, the user-provided information can be used to better describe the intrinsic semantic relationships between images. Our algorithm is fundamentally based on LPP which can incorporate user's relevance feedbacks. As the user's feedbacks are accumulated, we can ultimately obtain a semantic subspace in which different semantic classes can be best separated and the retrieval performance can be enhanced. We compared our proposed algorithm to PCA and the standard LPP. Experimental results on a large collection of images have shown the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.     

一种基于内容图像检索的半监督和主动学习算法

为了提高图像检索中相关反馈算法的效率,提出了一种新的基于相关概率的主动学习算法SVMpr,并结合半监督学习,设计了基于半监督的主动学习图像检索框架。在相关反馈过程中,首先利用半监督学习算法TSVM对标记样本进行训练,然后根据提出的主动学习算法从未标记图像中选取k幅有利于优化学习过程的图像并反馈给用户标记。与传统的相关反馈算法相比,该文提出的图像检索框架显著提高了学习器的效率和性能,并快速收敛于用户的查询概念。     

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.     

Image retrieval based on augmented relational graph representation

The “semantic gap” problem is one of the main difficulties in image retrieval tasks. Semi-supervised learning, typically integrated with the relevance feedback techniques, is an effective method to narrow down the semantic gap. However, in semi-supervised learning, the amount of unlabeled data is usually much greater than that of labeled data. Therefore, the performance of a semi-supervised learning algorithm relies heavily on its effectiveness of using the relationships between the labeled and unlabeled data. This paper proposes a novel algorithm to better explore those relationships by augmenting the relational graph representation built on the entire data set, expected to increase the intra-class weights while decreasing the inter-class weights and linking the potential intra-class data. The augmented relational matrix can be directly used in any semi-supervised learning algorithms. The experimental results in a range of feedback-based image retrieval tasks show that the proposed algorithm not only achieves good generality, but also outperforms other algorithms in the same semi-supervised learning framework.     

Fuzzy SVM for content-based image retrieval: a pseudo-label support vector machine framework

Conventional relevance feedback in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems uses only the labeled images for learning. Image labeling, however, is a time-consuming task and users are often unwilling to label too many images during the feedback process. This gives rise to the small sample problem where learning from a small number of training samples restricts the retrieval performance. To address this problem, we propose a technique based on the concept of pseudo-labeling in order to enlarge the training data set. As the name implies, a pseudo-labeled image is an image not labeled explicitly by the users, but estimated using a fuzzy rule. Therefore, it contains a certain degree of uncertainty or fuzziness in its class information. Fuzzy support vector machine (FSVM), an extended version of SVM, takes into account the fuzzy nature of some training samples during its training. In order to exploit the advantages of pseudo-labeling, active learning and the structure of FSVM, we develop a unified framework called pseudo-label fuzzy support vector machine (PLFSVM) to perform content-based image retrieval. Experimental results based on a database of 10,000 images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

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.     

基于选择关系嵌入算法的图像检索方法

结合流形学习和相关反馈技术的图像检索方法关键是结合低层可视化信息,从少量用户反馈信息中学习用户语义,以获得语义子空间流形。为获得更真实的语义子空间,文中在区分对待低层可视化和用户反馈信息的同时,基于低层可视化信息选择学习反馈信息中的类内和类间关系,提出一种选择关系嵌入算法应用于图像检索。该方法可保留更真实的语义流形结构,从而提高在低维空间中的检索精度。实验结果表明文中方法可将图像映射到更广范围的低维空间,在反馈迭代两次之后检索精度提高最高可达16。3%。     

Information fusion between short term learning and long term learning in content based image retrieval systems

Content based image retrieval (CBIR) systems could provide more precise results by taking the user’s feedbacks into account. Two types of the relevance feedback learning paradigms are short term learning (STL) and long term learning (LTL). By using both STL and LTL, a collaborative CBIR system is proposed in this paper. The proposed system introduced three fusion methods: including fusion in retrieved images, fusion in ranks, and fusion in similarities to make cooperation between STL and LTL. The proposed fusion methods are examined in a CBIR system equipped with a proposed statistical semantic clustering (SSC) method of LTL. The SSC method works based on the concept of semantic categories of the images by clustering techniques and constructing a relevancy matrix between images and semantic categories. The results of the SSC method with the suggested fusion methods are compared with two state-of-the-art LTL methods, namely virtual feature based method and dynamic semantic clustering. Comparative results confirm the efficiency of the proposed method. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate that for a unique LTL method, various fusion methods lead to different results.     

基于Nyström 低阶近似的半监督流形排序图像检索

实际图像检索过程中,用户提供的相关反馈有限,但存在大量未标记图像数据. 本文在前期半监督流形图像检索工作的基础上,提出一种基于Nystrm低阶 近似的半监督流形排序图像检索方法.通过采用半监督的流形正则化框架, 将图像数据嵌入到低维流形结构中进行分类排序,以充分利用大量未标记数据, 并兼顾分类误差、数据分布的几何结构以及分类函数的复杂性.针对半监督学习速度缓慢的问题, 基于Nystrm低阶近似对学习过程进行加速.在较大规模的Corel图像数据集上进行了检索实验, 实验结果表明该方法能获得较好的效果.     

Content based image retrieval via a transductive model

Content based image retrieval plays an important role in the management of a large image database. However, the results of state-of-the-art image retrieval approaches are not so satisfactory for the well-known gap between visual features and semantic concepts. Therefore, a novel transductive learning scheme named random walk with restart based method (RWRM) is proposed, consisting of three major components: pre-filtering processing, relevance score calculation, and candidate ranking refinement. Firstly, to deal with the problem of large computation cost involved in a large image database, a pre-filtering processing is utilized to filter out the most irrelevant images while keeping the most relevant images according to the results of a manifold ranking algorithm. Secondly, the relevance between a query image and the remaining images are obtained with respect to the probability density estimation. Finally, a transductive learning model, namely a random walk with restart model, is utilized to refine the ranking taking into account both the pairwise information of unlabeled images and the relevance scores between query image and unlabeled images. Experiments conducted on a typical Corel dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.