High-Dimensional Image Data Sets Retrieval: Improving Accuracy Using a Weighted Relevance Feedback

Abstract

The user's interaction with the retrieval engines, while seeking a particular image (or set of images) in large-scale databases, defines better his request. This interaction is essentially provided by a relevance feedback step. In fact, the semantic gap is increasing in a remarkable way due to the application of approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) algorithms aiming at resolving the curse of dimensionality. Therefore, an additional step of relevance feedback is necessary in order to get closer to the user's expectations in the next few retrieval iterations. In this context, this paper details a classification of the different relevance feedback techniques related to region-based image retrieval applications. Moreover, a technique of relevance feedback based on re-weighting regions of the query-image by selecting a set of negative examples is elaborated. Furthermore, the general context to carry out this technique which is the large-scale heterogeneous image collections indexing and retrieval is presented. In fact, the main contribution of the proposed work is affording efficient results with the minimum number of relevance feedback iterations for high dimensional image databases. Experiments and assessments are carried out within an RBIR system for "Wang" data set in order to prove the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.