Interactive Content Based Image Retrieval using Multiuser Feedback

Abstract

Retrieving images from large databases becomes a difficult task. Content based image retrieval (CBIR) deals with retrieval of images based on their similarities in content (features) between the query image and the target image. But the similarities do not vary equally in all directions of feature space. Further the CBIR efforts have relatively ignored the two distinct characteristics of the CBIR systems: 1) The gap between high level concepts and low level features; 2) Subjectivity of human perception of visual content. Hence an interactive technique called the relevance feedback technique was used. These techniques used user’s feedback about the retrieved images to reformulate the query which retrieves more relevant images during next iterations. But those relevance feedback techniques are called hard relevance feedback techniques as they use only two level user annotation. It was very difficult for the user to give feedback for the retrieved images whether they are relevant to the query image or not. To better capture user’s intention soft relevance feedback technique is proposed. This technique uses multilevel user annotation. But it makes use of only single user feedback. Hence Soft association rule mining technique is also proposed to infer image relevance from the collective feedback. Feedbacks from multiple users are used to retrieve more relevant images improving the performance of the system. Here soft relevance feedback and association rule mining techniques are combined. During first iteration prior association rules about the given query image are retrieved to find out the relevant images and during next iteration the feedbacks are inserted into the database and relevance feedback techniques are activated to retrieve more relevant images. The number of association rules is kept minimum based on redundancy detection.