Effective and Scalable Manifold Ranking-Based Image Retrieval with Output Bound

Abstract

Image retrieval keeps attracting a lot of attention from both academic and industry over past years due to its variety of useful applications. Due to the rapid growth of deep learning approaches, more better feature vectors of images could be discovered for improving image retrieval. However, most (if not all) existing deep learning approaches consider the similarity between two images locally without considering the similarity among a group of similar images globally , and thus could not return accurate results. In this article, we study the image retrieval with manifold ranking (MR) which considers both the local similarity and the global similarity, which could give more accurate results. However, existing best-known algorithms have one of the following issues: (1) they require to build a bulky index, (2) some of them do not have any theoretical bound on the output, and (3) some of them are time-consuming. Motivated by this, we propose two algorithms, namely Monte Carlo-based MR ( MCMR ) and MCMR+ , for image retrieval, which do not have the above issues. We are the first one to propose an index-free manifold ranking image retrieval with the output theoretical bound. More importantly, our algorithms give the first best-known time complexity result of \(O(n \log n)\) where \(n\) is the total number of images in the database compared with the existing best-known result of \(O(n^2)\) in the literature of computing the exact top- \(k\) results with quality guarantee. Lastly, our experimental result shows that MCMR+ outperforms existing algorithms by up to four orders of magnitude in terms of query time.