Joint semantics and feature based image retrieval using relevance feedback

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.

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.

With the rapid growing volume of images in medical databases, development of efficient image retrieval systems to retrieve relevant or similar images to a query image has become an active research area. Despite many efforts to improve the performance of techniques for accurate image retrieval, its success in biomedicine thus far has been quite limited. This article presents an adaptive content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system for improving the performance of image retrieval in mammographic databases. In this work, the authors propose a new relevance feedback approach based on incremental learning with support vector machine (SVM) regression. Also, the authors present a new local perturbation method to further improve the performance of the proposed relevance feedback system. The approaches enable efficient online learning by adapting the current trained model to changes prompted by the user's relevance feedback, avoiding the burden of retraining the CBIR system. To demonstrate the proposed image retrieval system, the authors used two mammogram data sets: A set of 76 mammograms scored based on geometrical similarity and a larger set of 200 mammograms scored by expert radiologists based on pathological findings. The experimental results show that the proposed relevance feedback strategy improves the retrieval precision for both data sets while achieving high efficiency compared to offline SVM. For the data set of 200 mammograms, the authors obtained an average precision of 0.48 and an area under the precision-recall curve of 0.79. In addition, using the same database, the authors achieved a high pathology matching rate greater than 80% between the query and the top retrieved images after relevance feedback. Using mammographic databases, the results demonstrate that the proposed approach is more accurate than the model without using relevance feedback not only in image retrieval but also in pathology matching while maintaining its effectiveness for online relevance feedback applications.

Although relevance feedback (RF) has been extensively studied in the content-based image retrieval community, no commercial Web image search engines support RF because of scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness issues. In this paper, we propose a unified relevance feedback framework for Web image retrieval. Our framework shows advantage over traditional RF mechanisms in the following three aspects. First, during the RF process, both textual feature and visual feature are used in a sequential way. To seamlessly combine textual feature-based RF and visual feature-based RF, a query concept-dependent fusion strategy is automatically learned. Second, the textual feature-based RF mechanism employs an effective search result clustering (SRC) algorithm to obtain salient phrases, based on which we could construct an accurate and low-dimensional textual space for the resulting Web images. Thus, we could integrate RF into Web image retrieval in a practical way. Last, a new user interface (UI) is proposed to support implicit RF. On the one hand, unlike traditional RF UI which enforces users to make explicit judgment on the results, the new UI regards the users' click-through data as implicit relevance feedback in order to release burden from the users. On the other hand, unlike traditional RF UI which hardily substitutes subsequent results for previous ones, a recommendation scheme is used to help the users better understand the feedback process and to mitigate the possible waiting caused by RF. Experimental results on a database consisting of nearly three million Web images show that the proposed framework is wieldy, scalable, and effective.

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has suffered from the lack of linkage between low-level features and high-level semantics. Although relevance feedback (RF) CBIR provides a promising solution involving human interaction, certain query images poorly represented by low-level features still have unsatisfactory retrieval results. An innovative method has been proposed to increase the percentage of relevance of target image database by using graph cuts theory with the maximum-flow/minimum-cut algorithm and relevance feedback. As a result, the database is reformed by keeping relevant images while discarding irrelevant images. The relevance is increased and thus during following RF-CBIR process, previously poorly represented relevant images have higher probability to appear for selection. Better performance and retrieval results can thus be achieved.

As the use of digital media increases, effective retrieval and management techniques become more important. In order to extract useful information from this huge amount of data, many content based image retrieval (CBIR) systems have been developed. A typical CBIR system captures image features such as color, texture, or shape of objects in the query image and tries to retrieve images from the database with similar features. The main advantage of CBIR systems with relevance feedback is that these systems take into account the gap between the high-level concepts and low-level features and subjectivity of human perception of visual content. In this paper, a CBIR system based on color histogram has been presented and a new approach for image storage and retrieval called association-based image retrieval (ABIR) has been studied. The results of both systems have been shown.

Relevance Feedback (RF) is a powerful technique in Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system and has become a very active research topic in the past few years. At the early stage of CBIR, research primarily focused on exploring various feature representation and ignored the subjectivity of human perception. There exists a gap between high-level concepts and low-level features. As an effective solution, the RF technique has been used on many CBIR systems to improve the retrieval precision. In this paper, a combined automatic weighting and relevance feedback method is proposed to improve the retrieval performance of CBIR. An approach using genetic algorithm for computing the initial weight of feature vector was introduced. By moving the query vector and updating the weighting factors simultaneously, the convergence speed of the relevance feedback retrieval is accelerated. Experimental results show that this method achieves high accuracy and effectiveness in CBIR.

Ontologies represent domain concepts and relations in a form of semantic network. Many research works use ontologies in the information matchmaking and retrieval. This trend is further accelerated by the convergence of various information sources supported by ontologies. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modality ontology model that integrates both the low-level image features and the high-level text information to represent image contents for image retrieval. By embedding this ontology into an image retrieval system, we are able to realize intelligent image retrieval with high precision. Moreover, benefiting from the soft-coded ontology model, this system has good flexibility and can be easily extended to the larger domains. Currently, our experiment is conducted on the animal domain canine. An ontology has been built based on the low-level features and the domain knowledge of canine. A prototype retrieval system is set up to assess the performance. We compare our experiment results with traditional text-based image search engine and prove the advantages of our approach.

The standard approach to content-based image retrieval is currently concerned with bridging the semantic gap or the gap between the results produced by the use of low-level features and the human end-user expectations based on high-level semantics. In this paper, we suggest that there are advantages to bridging the gap in two stages by proposing an intermediate level. We show that unsupervised clustering of low-level image features provides a suitable basis for an intermediate level representation and define a CBIR system using such an approach. The main advantages of using an intermediate level are (a) it is not necessary for all positive responses to a user query be categorized into a single class; (b) it is possible to overcome the small-sample problem with too few positive examples; and, (c) to improve performance without greatly increased computational cost. Experimental results on Wang's database (1000 images) and Corel Photo gallery (10,800 images) show that the intermediate level analysis leads to better results.

Image retrieval is an active area of research, which is growing very rapidly. Indeed, stimulated by the rapid growth in storage capacity and processing speed, the number of images in electronic collections and the World Wide Web has considerably increased over the last few years. However, with this abundance of information, people are continuously looking for tools that help them find the image(s) they are looking for within a reasonable amount of time. These tools are image retrieval engines. When using an image retrieval engine, the user is continuously interacting with the machine. First, he1 uses the system’s interface to formulate a query that expresses his needs. Second, he provides feedback about the retrieved results at each search iteration. This allows the engine to provide more accurate results by using relevance feedback (RF) techniques. Third, he may be asked to assign a goodness score or weight to each image retrieved, which helps evaluating the system’s performance. In this chapter, we will review the main interactions between human and the machine in the context of image retrieval. We will address several issues, including: Query formulation: • How the user expresses his needs and what he is looking for • The different ways the query can be formulated: keywords-based, sentence-based, query by example image, query by sketch, query by feature values, composite queries, etc. • Query by region of interest (ROI) vs. global query. • Queries with positive example only vs. queries with both positive and negative examples. • Page zero problem: finding a good image to initiate a retrieval session. Relevance feedback: we will try to answer questions like: • Why do systems use relevance feedback? • How can the user express his needs during the relevance feedback process • How this information is exploited by the system to perform operations like feature selection or the identification of the sought image. 1 Note that the masculine gender has been used strictly to facilitate reading, and is to be understood to include the feminine. Advances in Human-Computer Interaction 216 • The different families of RF techniques. • Relevance feedback with retrieval memory, i.e., taking into account the value of old iteration queries when constructing the new one. • Whether it is useful for the system to create user profiles, and the challenges it has to face. • The number of RF iterations required to obtain satisfactory results. Viewing retrieval results: • Existing viewing techniques: 2D linear presentation, 3D-based presentation, etc. • Different ways the resulting images may be ordered and presented to the user: similarity-ordered, time-ordered, event-ordered, etc. Evaluation of the retrieval performance by the user: • How the user can express his satisfaction/dissatisfaction about the retrieved images • What about the ground truth in image retrieval evaluation? • System response time and its influence on user satisfaction. • The ease of use of the system’s interface. Other issues: • User’s needs: He may be looking for a specific image, for images that meet a given need (e.g. illustrate a concept) or simply browsing the collection looking for potentially “good” images.

With the emerge of multimedia, communication and processing, a typical image database has a large volume of data. It is an essential to build an efficient retrieval system to browse through the entire database. In this paper we proposed precise Relevance Feed Back (RFB) Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) using multiple features based on interactive retrieval approach which will extensively reduces the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level semantics. Relevance Feed Back improves the retrieval accuracy of Content Based Image Retrieval(CBIR) by modifying the query based on the user's feedback in which the user can select the most relevant images and provide a weight of preference for each relevant image. In our approach we extracted multiple features by integrating color, texture and shape features with Relevance Feed Back. We extracted color features by cumulative histogram, texture feature are exploited by using Color co-occurrence matrix (CCM) and we describe the shape information contained in an image on the basis of its significant edges. We used Euclidean distance as the similarity measure. In our experiment we used Corel real-world image databases with 1000 images, divided into 10 categories, each category containing 100 images including landscapes, animals, plants, monuments, transport (cars, planes). Our results reflects that integrating color, texture and shape for retrieving similar images improves the retrieval performance with respect to retrieval accuracy and recall rate as compared with the classical color feature. During the experiment we also observed that incorporating Relevance Feed Back (RFB) with multiple features outperforms in comparison with multifeature vector without Relevance Feed Back method.

In content-based image retrieval, relevance feedback has been introduced to narrow the gap between low-level image feature and high-level semantic concept. Furthermore, to speed up the convergence to the query concept, several active learning methods have been proposed instead of random sampling to select images for labeling by the user. In this paper, we propose a novel active learning method named mean version space, aiming to select the optimal image in each round of relevance feedback. Firstly, by diving into the lemma that motivates support vector machine active learning method (SVMactive), we come up with a new criterion which is tailored for each specific learning task and will lead to the fastest shrinkage of the version space in all cases. The criterion takes both the size of the version space and the posterior probabilities into consideration, while existing methods are only based on one of them. Moreover, although our criterion is designed for SVM, it can be justified in a general framework. Secondly, to reduce processing time, we design two schemes to construct a small candidate set and evaluate the criterion for images in the set instead of all the unlabeled images. Systematic experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing active learning methods

In content-based image retrieval (CBIR), a set of low-level features are extracted from an image to represent its visual content. Retrieval is performed by image example where a query image is given as input by the user and an appropriate similarity measure is used to find the best matches in the corresponding feature space. This approach suffers from the fact that there is a large discrepancy between the low-level visual features that one can extract from an image and the semantic interpretation of the image’s content that a particular user may have in a given situation. That is, users seek semantic similarity, but we can only provide similarity based on low-level visual features extracted from the raw pixel data, a situation known as the semantic gap. The selection of an appropriate similarity measure is thus an important problem. Since visual content can be represented by different attributes, the combination and importance of each set of features varies according to the user’s semantic intent. Thus, the retrieval strategy should be adaptive so that it can accommodate the preferences of different users. Relevance feedback (RF) learning has been proposed as a technique aimed at reducing the semantic gap. It works by gathering semantic information from user interaction. Based on the user’s feedback on the retrieval results, the retrieval scheme is adjusted. By providing an image similarity measure under human perception, RF learning can be seen as a form of supervised learning that finds relations between high-level semantic interpretations and low-level visual properties. That is, the feedback obtained within a single query session is used to personalize the retrieval strategy and thus enhance retrieval performance. In this chapter we present an overview of CBIR and related work on RF learning. We also present our own previous work on a RF learning-based probabilistic region relevance learning algorithm for automatically estimating the importance of each region in an image based on the user’s semantic intent.

This paper presents a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system that incorporates real-valued multiple instance learning (MIL) into the user relevance feedback (RF) to learn the user's subjective visual concepts, especially where the user's most interested region and how to map the local feature vector of that region to the high-level concept pattern of the user. RF provides a way to obtain the subjectivity of the user's high-level visual concepts, and MIL enables the automatic learning of the user's high-level concepts. The user interacts with the CBIR system by relevance feedback in a way that the extent to which the image samples retrieved by the system are relevant to the user's intention is labeled. The system in turn applies the MIL method to find user's most interested image region from the feedback. A multilayer neural network that is trained progressively through the feedback and learning procedure is used to map the low-level image features to the high-level concepts.

Medical image retrieval can assist physicians in finding information supporting their diagnosis and fulfilling information needs. Systems that allow searching for medical images need to provide tools for quick and easy navigation and query refinement as the time available for information search is often short. Relevance feedback is a powerful tool in information retrieval. This study evaluates relevance feedback techniques with regard to the content they use. A novel relevance feedback technique that uses both text and visual information of the results is proposed. The two information modalities from the image examples are fused either at the feature level using the Rocchio algorithm or at the query list fusion step using a common late fusion rule. Results using the ImageCLEF 2012 benchmark database for medical image retrieval show the potential of relevance feedback techniques in medical image retrieval. The mean average precision (mAP) is used as the evaluation metric and the proposed method outperforms commonly-used methods. The baseline without feedback reached 16 % whereas the relevance feedback with 20 images reached up to 26.35 % with three steps and when using 100 images up to 34.87 % in four steps. Most improvements occur in the first two steps of relevance feedback and then results start to become relatively flat. This might also be due to only using positive feedback as negative feeback often also improves results after more steps. The effect of relevance feedback in automatically spelling corrected and translated queries is investigated as well. Results without mistakes were better than spell-corrected results but the spelling correction more than double results over non-corrected retrieval. Multimodal relevance feedback has shown to be able to help visual medical information retrieval. Next steps include integrating semantics into relevance feedback techniques to benefit from the structured knowledge of ontologies and experimenting on the fusion of text and visual information.