Relevance feedback (RF) is an iterative process which improves the performance of content-based image retrieval by modifying the query and similarity metric based on the user’s feedback on the retrieval results. This short-term learning within a single query session is called intra-query learning. However, the interaction history of previous users over all past queries may also be potentially exploited to help improve the retrieval performance for the current query. The long-term learning accumulated over the course of many query sessions is called inter-query learning. We present a novel RF framework that learns one-class support vector machines (1SVM) from retrieval experience to represent the set memberships of users’ high-level concepts and stores them in a “concept database”. The “concept database” provides a mechanism for accumulating inter-query learning obtained from previous queries. By doing a fuzzy classification of a query into the regions of support represented by the 1SVMs, past experience is merged with current intra-query learning. The geometric view of 1SVM allows a straightforward interpretation of the density of past interaction in a local area of the feature space and thus allows the decision of exploiting past information only if enough past exploration of the local area has occurred. The proposed approach is evaluated on real data sets and compared against both traditional intra-query-learning-only RF approaches and other methods that also exploit inter-query learning.
['Iker Gondra', 'R. Heisterkamp', 'Jing Peng']
Improving image retrieval performance by inter-query learning with one-class support vector machines