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Enhancing relevance feedback in image retrieval using unlabeled data

Published:01 April 2006Publication History
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Abstract

Relevance feedback is an effective scheme bridging the gap between high-level semantics and low-level features in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). In contrast to previous methods which rely on labeled images provided by the user, this article attempts to enhance the performance of relevance feedback by exploiting unlabeled images existing in the database. Concretely, this article integrates the merits of semisupervised learning and active learning into the relevance feedback process. In detail, in each round of relevance feedback two simple learners are trained from the labeled data, that is, images from user query and user feedback. Each learner then labels some unlabeled images in the database for the other learner. After retraining with the additional labeled data, the learners reclassify the images in the database and then their classifications are merged. Images judged to be positive with high confidence are returned as the retrieval result, while those judged with low confidence are put into the pool which is used in the next round of relevance feedback. Experiments show that using semisupervised learning and active learning simultaneously in CBIR is beneficial, and the proposed method achieves better performance than some existing methods.

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  1. Enhancing relevance feedback in image retrieval using unlabeled data

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          Richard CHBEIR

          Relevance feedback in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is addressed in this paper, which provides an interesting approach based on a preliminary method-semi-supervised active image retrieval with asymmetry (SSAIRA). This approach involves three issues: a small sample size, an asymmetric training sample, and a real-time requirement. In this work, the authors propose a learning method by considering two learners trained from the labeled data. The user query is considered as the labeled positive example, while the image database is considered initially as a set of unlabeled data. The two learners are defined with respect to the Minkowski distance, and they are differentiated by the order of this distance. The defined learners are easy to update, which makes the relevance feedback process more efficient. In addition, the learning algorithm deals with negative image examples. The authors consider each image to be representative of a semantic class, and images close to a negative example may belong to the same class. To define the representative of the class, they calculate the k-nearest neighbors of negative examples. One may wonder why they use the Euclidian distance in the neighborhood calculation, when other more adaptive methods can be applied and used instead. However, several rich and satisfactory experimental tests have been conducted by the authors to validate their approach and to test its relevance compared with current approaches. Online Computing Reviews Service

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