SVM-based Relevance Feedback Research Articles

A new SVM-based relevance feedback image retrieval using probabilistic feature and weighted kernel function

Relevance feedback (RF) is an effective approach to bridge the gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic meanings in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). The support vector machine (SVM) based RF mechanisms have been used in different fields of image retrieval, but they often treat all positive and negative feedback samples equally, which will inevitably degrade the effectiveness of SVM-based RF approaches for CBIR. In fact, positive and negative feedback samples, different positive feedback samples, and different negative feedback samples all always have distinct properties. Moreover, each feedback interaction process is usually tedious and time-consuming because of complex visual features, so if too many times of iteration of feedback are asked, users may be impatient to interact with the CBIR system. To overcome the above limitations, we propose a new SVM-based RF approach using probabilistic feature and weighted kernel function in this paper. Firstly, the probabilistic features of each image are extracted by using principal components analysis (PCA) and the adapted Gaussian mixture models (AGMM) based dimension reduction, and the similarity is computed by employing Kullback–Leibler divergence. Secondly, the positive feedback samples and negative feedback samples are marked, and all feedback samples’ weight values are computed by utilizing the samples-based Relief feature weighting. Finally, the SVM kernel function is modified dynamically according to the feedback samples’ weight values. Extensive simulations on large databases show that the proposed algorithm is significantly more effective than the state-of-the-art approaches.

Active SVM-based relevance feedback using multiple classifiers ensemble and features reweighting

Relevance feedback (RF) is an effective approach to bridge the gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic meanings in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). The active support vector machine (SVM) based RFs have been popular because they can outperform many other classifiers when the size of the training set is small, but they are often very complex and some unsatisfactory relevance of results occur frequently. To overcome the above limitations, an active SVM-based RF using multiple classifiers ensemble and features reweighting is proposed in this paper. Firstly, we select the most informative images by using active learning method for user to label, and quickly learn a boundary that separates the images that satisfy the user's query concept from the rest of the dataset. Secondly, the feature space is modified dynamically by appropriately weighting the descriptive features according to a set of statistical characteristics. Then, a set of moderate accurate one-class SVM classifiers are trained separately by using different new sub-features vectors. Finally, we compute the weight vector of component SVM classifiers dynamically by using the parameters for positive and negative samples, and combine the results of the component classifiers to form an output code as a hypothesized solution to the overall image retrieval problem. Extensive simulations on large databases show that the proposed algorithm is significantly more effective than the state-of-the-art approaches.

Semisupervised Biased Maximum Margin Analysis for Interactive Image Retrieval

With many potential practical applications, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has attracted substantial attention during the past few years. A variety of relevance feedback (RF) schemes have been developed as a powerful tool to bridge the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic concepts, and thus to improve the performance of CBIR systems. Among various RF approaches, support-vector-machine (SVM)-based RF is one of the most popular techniques in CBIR. Despite the success, directly using SVM as an RF scheme has two main drawbacks. First, it treats the positive and negative feedbacks equally, which is not appropriate since the two groups of training feedbacks have distinct properties. Second, most of the SVM-based RF techniques do not take into account the unlabeled samples, although they are very helpful in constructing a good classifier. To explore solutions to overcome these two drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a biased maximum margin analysis (BMMA) and a semisupervised BMMA (SemiBMMA) for integrating the distinct properties of feedbacks and utilizing the information of unlabeled samples for SVM-based RF schemes. The BMMA differentiates positive feedbacks from negative ones based on local analysis, whereas the SemiBMMA can effectively integrate information of unlabeled samples by introducing a Laplacian regularizer to the BMMA. We formally formulate this problem into a general subspace learning task and then propose an automatic approach of determining the dimensionality of the embedded subspace for RF. Extensive experiments on a large real-world image database demonstrate that the proposed scheme combined with the SVM RF can significantly improve the performance of CBIR systems.

Ensemble one-class support vector machines for content-based image retrieval

In order to narrow semantic gap between user query concept and low-level features in content-based image retrieval, SVM-based relevance feedback techniques are developed to learn user’s query concept by labeling some samples. The major difficulty in relevance feedback is to estimate the support of target image in high-dimensional feature space with small number of training samples. To overcome this limitation, we propose an ensemble method to boost image retrieval accuracy and to improve its generalization performance. Images are segmented into multiple instances. A set of moderate accurate one-class support vector machine classifiers are trained separately by using different sub-features extracted from instances. The ensemble method results in a highly accurate by combining moderately accurate weak classifiers. Our propose ensemble scheme not only provides a robust mechanism in selecting strong query concept related images for relevant feedback, but also achieves a generalization performance in image retrieval.

Semantic interactive image retrieval combining visual and conceptual content description

We address the challenge of semantic gap reduction for image retrieval through an improved support vector machines (SVM)-based active relevance feedback framework, together with a hybrid visual and conceptual content representation and retrieval. We introduce a new feature vector based on projecting the keywords associated to an image on a set of "key concepts" with the help of an external lexical database. We then put forward two improvements of SVM-based relevance feedback method. First, to optimize the transfer of information between the user and the system, we introduce a new active learning selection criterion that minimizes redundancy between the candidate images shown to the user. Second, as most image classes span a wide range of scales in the description space, we argue that the insensitivity of the SVM to the scale of the data is desirable in this context and we show how to obtain it by using specific kernel functions. Experimental evaluations show that the joint use of the new concept-based feature vector and the visual features with our relevance feedback scheme can significantly improve the quality of the results.

Multitraining Support Vector Machine for Image Retrieval

Relevance feedback (RF) schemes based on support vector machines (SVMs) have been widely used in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). However, the performance of SVM-based RF approaches is often poor when the number of labeled feedback samples is small. This is mainly due to 1) the SVM classifier being unstable for small-size training sets because its optimal hyper plane is too sensitive to the training examples; and 2) the kernel method being ineffective because the feature dimension is much greater than the size of the training samples. In this paper, we develop a new machine learning technique, multitraining SVM (MTSVM), which combines the merits of the cotraining technique and a random sampling method in the feature space. Based on the proposed MTSVM algorithm, the above two problems can be mitigated. Experiments are carried out on a large image set of some 20,000 images, and the preliminary results demonstrate that the developed method consistently improves the performance over conventional SVM-based RFs in terms of precision and standard deviation, which are used to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of a RF algorithm, respectively.

Asymmetric bagging and random subspace for support vector machines-based relevance feedback in image retrieval

Relevance feedback schemes based on support vector machines (SVM) have been widely used in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). However, the performance of SVM-based relevance feedback is often poor when the number of labeled positive feedback samples is small. This is mainly due to three reasons: 1) an SVM classifier is unstable on a small-sized training set, 2) SVM's optimal hyperplane may be biased when the positive feedback samples are much less than the negative feedback samples, and 3) overfitting happens because the number of feature dimensions is much higher than the size of the training set. In this paper, we develop a mechanism to overcome these problems. To address the first two problems, we propose an asymmetric bagging-based SVM (AB-SVM). For the third problem, we combine the random subspace method and SVM for relevance feedback, which is named random subspace SVM (RS-SVM). Finally, by integrating AB-SVM and RS-SVM, an asymmetric bagging and random subspace SVM (ABRS-SVM) is built to solve these three problems and further improve the relevance feedback performance.