Relevance feedback for image retrieval in structured multi-feature spaces

We systematically compare four variants of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) for relevance feedback (RF) in image retrieval. We focus on the small sample size (SSS) performance, i.e., the requirement to learn the user’s information need based on a small – between 2 and 25 – number of positive and negative training images. Despite this being a fundamental requirement, none of the existing works dealing with EAs for RF in image retrieval addresses it. Common for the four variants is the hierarchical, region-based image similarity model, with region and feature weights as parameters. The difference between the variants is in the objective function of the EA used to adjust the model parameters. The objective functions include: (O-1) precision; (O-2) average rank; (O-3) ratio of within-class (i.e., positive images) and between-class (i.e., positive and negative images) scatter; and (O-4) combination of O-2 and O-3. We note that – unlike O-1 and O-2 – O-3 and O-4 are not used in any of the existing works dealing with EAs for RF. The four variants are evaluated on five test databases, containing 61,895 general-purpose images, in 619 semantic categories. Results of the evaluation reveal that variants with objective functions O-3 and O-4 consistently outperform those with O-1 and O-2. Furthermore, comparison with the representative of the existing RF methods shows that EAs are both effective and efficient approaches for SSS learning in region-based image retrieval.

This paper proposes the implementation of a content-based image retrieval system that uses MPEG-7 color image descriptors, integrated into a medical record database. The system functionality is proven in the framework of an oncology application. Several classical relevance feedback methods are evaluated in conjunction with the image content descriptors in terms of overall retrieval rate improvement.

A relevance feedback (RF) approach for content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is proposed, which is based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and uses a feature selection technique to reduce the dimensionality of the image feature space. Specifically, each image is described by a multidimensional vector combining color, texture and shape information. In each RF round, the positive and negative examples provided by the user are used to determine a relatively small number of the most important features for the corresponding classification task, via a feature selection methodology. After the feature selection has been performed, an SVM classifier is trained to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant images according to the preferences of the user, using the restriction of the user examples on the set of selected features. The trained classifier is subsequently used to provide an updated ranking of the database images represented in the space of the selected features. Numerical experiments are presented that demonstrate the merits of the proposed relevance feedback methodology.KeywordsContent-based image retrievalrelevance feedbacksupport vector machinesfeature selection

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.

In content-base image retrieval, relevance feedback (RF) schemes based on support vector machine (SVM) have been widely used to narrow the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level human perception. However, the performance of image retrieval with SVM active learning is known to be poor when the training data is insufficient. In this paper, the problem is solved by incorporating the unlabelled images into the learning process. We proposed a semi-supervised active learning algorithm which uses not only labeled training samples but also unlabeled ones to build better models. In relevance feedback, active learning algorithm is often used to reduce the cost of labeling by selecting only the most informative data. In addition, we introduced a semi-supervised approach which employed Nearest-Neighbor technique to label the unlabeled sample with a certain degree of uncertainty in its class information. Using these samples, Fuzzy support vector machine (FSVM) which takes into account the fuzzy nature of some training samples during its training is trained. We compared our method with standard active SVM on a database of 10,000 images, the experiment results show that the efficiency of SVM active learning can be improved by incorporating unlabelled images, and thus improve the overall retrieval performance. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v11i7.2807

An image retrieval system was developed purposely to provide an efficient tool for a set of images from a collection of images in the large database that matches the user’s requirements in similarity evaluations such as image content similarity, edge, and colour similarity. Retrieving images based on the contents which are colour, texture, and shape is called content-based image retrieval (CBIR). This paper discusses and describes about the colour features technique for image retrieval systems. Several colour features technique and algorithms produced by the previous researcher are used to calculate the similarity between extracted features. This paper also describes about the specific technique about the colour basis features and combined features (hybrid techniques) between colour and shape features.

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.

Finding an image from a large set of images is an extremely difficult problem. One solution is to label images manually, but this is very expensive, time consuming and infeasible for many applications. Furthermore, the labeling process depends on the semantic accuracy in describing the image. Therefore many Content based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems are developed to extract low-level features for describing the image content. However, this approach decreases the human interaction with the system due to the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level concepts. In this study we make use of fuzzy logic to improve CBIR by allowing users to express their requirements in words, the natural way of human communication. In our system the image is represented by a Fuzzy Attributed Relational Graph (FARG) that describes each object in the image, its attributes and spatial relation. The texture and color attributes are computed in a way that model the Human Vision System (HSV). We proposed a new approach for graph matching that resemble the human thinking process. The proposed system is evaluated by different users with different perspectives and is found to match users' satisfaction to a high degree.

Relevance feedback is a powerful technique to enhance Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) performance. It solicits the user's relevance judgments on the retrieved images returned by the CBIR systems. The user's labeling is then used to learn a classifier to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant images. However, the top returnedimages may not be the most informative ones. The challenge is thus to determine which unlabeled images would be the most informative (i.e., improve the classifier the most) if they were labeled and used as training samples. In this paper, we propose a novel active learning algorithm, called Laplacian Optimal Design (LOD), for relevance feedback image retrieval. Our algorithm is based on aregression model which minimizes the least square error on the measured (or, labeled) images and simultaneously preserves the local geometrical structure of the image space. Specifically, we assume that if two images are sufficiently close to each other, then their measurements (or, labels) are close as well. By constructing a nearest neighbor graph, the geometrical structure of the image space can be described by the graph Laplacian. We discuss how results from the field of optimal experimental design may be used to guide our selection of a subset of images, which gives us the most amount of information. Experimental results on Corel database suggest that theproposed approach achieves higher precision in relevance feedback image retrieval.

In image retrieval, relevance feedback uses information, obtained interactively from the user, to understand the user's perceptions of a query image and to improve retrieval accuracy. We propose simultaneous relevant feature selection and classification using the samples provided by the user to improve retrieval accuracy. The classifier is defined by a separating hyperplane, while the sparse weight vector characterizing the hyperplane defines a small set of relevant features. This set of relevant features is used for classification and can be used for analysis at a later stage. Mutually exclusive sets of images are shown to the user at each iteration to obtain maximum information from the user. Experimental results show that our algorithm performs better than the feature relevance weighting and feature selection schemes and comparably with the classification scheme using SVMs, in terms of retrieval accuracy, and it has the advantage of being faster than the classification scheme using SVMs.

Content Based Image retrieval(CBIR) has a important place in research field. This paper deals with the realization of different approaches used in image retrieval based on content. In CBIR, a query image is searched from larger database by selecting features from image and then exact match is retrieved using efficient algorithms. The various CBIR approaches are reviewed such as relevance feedback, SVM, graphs, wavelet transform, Gabor filter, Semantic templates, GMM, Fuzzy logic, Object ontology, Machine intelligence and Histogram. In this paper, the various graph theory algorithms used in CBIR have been discussed and compared viz. NN Graphs, Collocation Tree, Graphlets, Efficient Manifold Ranking, A* algorithm and segmentation algorithm.

This paper describes the unsupervised-interactive learning method, using the self-organizing tree map (SOTM) architecture, for the automation of relevance feedback (RF) in content-based image retrieval. The SOTM is shown to exhibit good behavior in relevance classification; providing a possible solution to minimizing user interactions in both fully automatic and semiautomatic domains, while achieving high retrieval accuracy in the context of adaptive retrieval. Computer simulation shows this system is very effective when applied to compressed domain retrieval systems for texture retrieval and the JPEG photograph database applications.

Combining manifold ranking with active learning (MRAL for short) is one popular and successful technique for relevance feedback in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Despite the success, conventional MRAL has two main drawbacks. First, the performance of manifold ranking is very sensitive to the scale parameter used for calculating the Laplacian matrix. Second, conventional MRAL does not take into account the redundancy among examples and thus could select multiple examples that are similar to each other. In this work, a novel MRAL framework is presented to address the drawbacks. Concretely, we first propose a self-tuning manifold ranking algorithm that can adaptively calculate the Laplacian matrix via a local scaling mechanism, and then develop a hybrid active learning algorithm by integrating three well-known selective sampling criteria, which is able to effectively and efficiently identify the most informative and diversified examples for the user to label. Experiments on 10,000 Corel images show that the proposed method is significantly more effective than some existing approaches.

In this paper, a color image representation approach is proposed for color image retrieval. First, an input color image is represented by a number representative images (called color degree images) consisting of chromatic (including red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow) and achromatic (including black and white) degree images. For each pixel, the degree to which its color value is similar to each representative color will be computed. For the local window centered at each detected key point, a vector representing the degree values, called local color degree (LCD) descriptor, will be computed to describe the local color property. Meanwhile, the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptor is extracted to describe the local texture characteristics. Both LCD descriptor and SIFT descriptor are combined together to form the local descriptor. Vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD) is then employed to aggregate all local descriptors to get a single VLAD vector for each input image. Experimental results on INRIA Holidays and Leeds Butterfly datasets have shown that the proposed descriptor yield higher retrieval accuracy.

Image retrieval systems play a crucial role in a variety of applications, from digital asset management to medical imaging and security. This paper presents a comparative analysis of current image retrieval methods, focusing on their effectiveness, efficiency, and applicability across different contexts. We systematically evaluate several prominent techniques, including content-based image retrieval (CBIR), semantic-based retrieval, and hybrid approaches that combine multiple methodologies. The evaluation criteria encompass retrieval accuracy, computational complexity, and user interaction effectiveness. Through a series of experiments and case studies, we assess the performance of these methods using benchmark datasets and real-world scenarios. Our analysis highlights the strengths and limitations of each approach, providing insights into their suitability for specific applications. The findings aim to guide practitioners and researchers in selecting the most appropriate image retrieval method based on their needs and constraints. This study contributes to the understanding of image retrieval technologies and their impact on information retrieval systems.