Interactive pattern analysis for relevance feedback in multimedia information retrieval

Relevance feedback is a mechanism to interactively learn a user's query concept online. It has been extensively used to improve the performance of multimedia information retrieval. In this paper, we present a novel interactive pattern analysis method that reduces relevance feedback to a two-class classification problem and classifies multimedia objects as relevant or irrelevant. To perform interactive pattern analysis, we propose two online pattern classification methods, called interactive random forests (IRF) and adaptive random forests (ARF), that adapt a composite classifier known as random forests for relevance feedback. IRF improves the efficiency of regular random forests (RRF) with a novel two-level resampling technique called biased random sample reduction, while ARF boosts the performance of RRF with two adaptive learning techniques called dynamic feature extraction and adaptive sample selection. During interactive multimedia retrieval, both ARF and IRF run two to three times faster than RRF while achieving comparable precision and recall against the latter. Extensive experiments on a COREL image set (with 31,438 images) demonstrate that our methods (i.e., IRF and RRF) achieve at least a 20% improvement on average precision and recall over the state-of-the-art approaches.