Online social image ranking in diversified preferences

Abstract

Due to the prevalence of social media service, effective and efficient online image retrieval is in urgent need to satisfy diversified requirements of Web users. Previous studies are mainly focusing on bridging the semantic gap by well-established content modeling with semantic information and social tagging information, but they are not flexible in aggregating the diversified expectations of the online users. In this paper, we present OSIR, a solution framework to facilitate the diversified preference styles in online social media image searching by textual query inputs. First, we propose an efficient Online Multiple Kernel Ranking (OMKR) model which is constructed on multiple query dimensions and complimentary feature channels, and trained by minimizing the triplet loss on hard negative samples. By optimizing the ranking performance with multi-dimensional queries, the semantic consistency between the image ranking and textual query input is directly maximized without relying on the intermediate semantic annotation procedure. Second, we construct random walk-based preference modeling by domain-specific similarity calculation on heterogeneous social attributes. By re-ranking the rank output of OMKR based on each preference ranking model, we obtain a set of ranking lists encoding different potential aspects of user preference. Last, we propose an effective and efficient position-sensitive rank aggregation approach to aggregate multiple ranking results based on the user preference specification. Extensive experiment on two social media datasets demonstrates the advantages of our approach in both retrieval performance and user experience.