A feature re-weighting approach for relevance feedback in image retrieval

Users of image databases often prefer to retrieve relevant images by categories. Unfortunately, images are usually indexed by low-level features like color, texture and shape, which often fail to capture high-level concepts well. To address this issue, relevance feedback has been extensively used to associate low-level image features with high-level concepts. Among all existing relevance feedback approaches, query movement and feature re-weighting have been proven to be suitable for large-scaled image databases with high dimensional image features. In this paper, we present a feature re-weighting approach using relevant images as well as irrelevant ones in the relevance feedback. As far as feature re-weighting approaches are concerned, one of their common drawbacks is that the feature re-weighting process is prone to be trapped by suboptimal states. To overcome this problem, we introduce a disturbing factor, which is based on the Fisher criterion, to push the feature weights out of sub-optimum. Experimental results on a large-scaled image database with 31,438 COREL images demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method.