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Pattern Recognition Letters 29 (2008) 637–646 www.elsevier.com/locate/patrec

An active feedback framework for image retrieval Tao Qin a,1, Xu-Dong Zhang a, Tie-Yan Liu b,*, De-Sheng Wang a, Wei-Ying Ma b, Hong-Jiang Zhang b b

a Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, PR China Microsoft Research Asia, No. 49 Zhichun Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100080, PR China

Received 17 January 2006; received in revised form 29 April 2007 Available online 15 December 2007 Communicated by R. Manmatha

Abstract In recent years, relevance feedback has been studied extensively as a way to improve performance of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Since users are usually unwilling to provide much feedback, the insufficiency of training samples limits the success of relevance feedback. In this paper, we propose two strategies to tackle this problem: (i) to make relevance feedback more informative by presenting representative images for users to label; (ii) to make use of unlabeled data in the training process. As a result, an active feedback framework is proposed, consisting of two components, representative image selection and label propagation. For practical implementation of this framework, we develop two coupled algorithms corresponding to the two components, namely, overlapped subspace clustering and multi-subspace label propagation. Experimental results on a very large-scale image collection demonstrated the high effectiveness of the proposed active feedback framework. Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Active learning; Image retrieval; Clustering; Relevance feedback

1. Introduction The success of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is greatly limited by the gap between low-level features and high-level semantics. In order to reduce this gap, relevance feedback has been introduced from the domain of textual document retrieval. Relevance feedback iteratively refines the retrieval results by learning from user-labeled examples. Although relevance feedback is an effective approach, it suffers from the fact that users do not like to label too many images, even if this is helpful to improve the retrieval

*

Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 10 62617711; fax: +86 10 62555337. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (T. Qin), zhangxd@ tsinghua.edu.cn (X.-D. Zhang), [email protected] (T.-Y. Liu), [email protected] (D.-S. Wang), [email protected] (W.-Y. Ma), [email protected] (H.-J. Zhang). 1 This work was performed when the author was an intern at Microsoft Research Asia. 0167-8655/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.patrec.2007.11.015

accuracy. As a result, the examples we could get during the feedback process are very limited. To cope with this problem, we propose the following two approaches in this paper: (i) to make user’s feedback more informative by presenting representative images to the users (the definition of ‘‘representative images” will be given in Section 4). In such a way, labeled examples will contain more information. (ii) To leverage unlabeled data in the training phase, the number of which could be much more than that of the few labeled images. Correspondingly, in this paper, an active feedback framework is proposed, with two novel components named representative image selection and label propagation. In particular, we further develop two algorithms, i.e., overlapped subspace clustering and multi-subspace label propagation to realize these two components in this paper. It is noted that these two algorithms are not independent, but are highly coupled and can be jointly optimized. Experimental results on a very large-scale image collection demonstrated the

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high effectiveness of the proposed active feedback framework. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews related work on relevance feedback based CBIR. The new active feedback framework for CBIR is presented in Section 3. The technical details of two new units (representative image selection and label propagation) of the framework are given in Sections 4 and 5. In Section 6, experimental results are reported to show the effectiveness of the proposed active feedback framework. Concluding remarks are given in Section 7. 2. Related work The early relevance feedback algorithms for CBIR, which were borrowed from the field of textual document retrieval, include query refinement (Rui et al., 1998) and re-weighting (Rui et al., 1998). Rui and Huang (1999) combined these two approaches to minimize the total distance between the positive examples and the refined query point with a refined similarity metric. However, because the positive images may distribute dispersively in the feature space, it is difficult to retrieve them directly based on low-level feature similarity, either refined or not. To overcome the disadvantages of the early relevance feedback algorithms, statistical learning technologies have been applied in recent years. The representative works include Bayesian inference (Su et al., 2001; Vasconcelos and Lippman, 1999), Boosting (Tieu and Viola, 2000) and support vector machines (SVM) (Chen et al., 2001; Jing et al., 2003; Tong and Chang, 2001). Due to its clear mathematical formation and well founded theory, SVM has attracted wide attention in the literature. So we also take SVM as an example to illustrate our proposed framework. The proposed methodologies, however, can be applied to Boosting and Bayesian inference as well. Chen et al. (2001) estimated the distribution of positive examples with a one-class SVM, and returned images with largest probabilities as relevant images. They avoided estimating the distribution of the negative examples which is very complex and difficult to model. Tong and Chang (2001) proposed a SVM-based active learning scheme. They provided the users with the most informative images to label and use SVM to learn a hyperplane that separates the positive examples from the negative ones. The most informative images in their paper are those images closest to the classification boundary, for which SVM has lowest confidence. Such a data selection strategy is reasonable and may lead to faster convergence of relevance feedback. Experiments in (Jing et al., 2003) showed that two-class SVM as a classifier outperforms one-class SVM as a distribution estimator for image retrieval. Although the statistical learning algorithms have been proved to be effective, their successes in CBIR are limited. The key problem is that the training samples (user’s labels) are often not sufficient to ensure the performance of the

learning machine. As pointed out by Donoho (2000), more or less the learning theory for data analysis is based on the assumption of D < N (where D is the feature dimension and N is the number of samples). However, in the case of image retrieval, training samples are often much smaller than the dimension of features. In other words, we face a typical ‘‘insufficient training sample” problem. To improve the performance of relevance feedback, we have to address this issue. There have been some meaningful attempts in this direction. Wu et al. (2000) tried to solve this problem with transduction method. Transduction (Vapnik, 1998) adopts a discriminative model, and maximizes its margins on both labeled and unlabeled data, provided that the labeled samples are classified as correctly as possible. The disadvantage of their work is that to find the optimal decision boundary requires solving a mixed integer programming problem that is NP-complete. Chang et al. (2003) suggested enlarging the training set by recursive subspace co-training (Lai and Chang, 2002). They provided each training sample set with distinct subspace views to boost the pool of the negative examples. However, this method cannot handle positive examples. 3. Active feedback framework To address the problem of insufficient training examples, we add two new processing units to the traditional relevance feedback pipeline, so as to formulate a new active feedback framework, which is shown in Fig. 1. The four units, query submission, retrieval, user labeling and learning, are inherited from the previous works. The two new units, representative image selection and label propagation are our key contributions in this paper. The advantages of this framework include: (1) Benefiting from representative images selection, a few representative images are delivered to users for labeling. It can not only make the labeling work of users

Query Submission Single or Multiple examples

Retrieval Output the ranked list for all images in the database

Learning Any supervised learning methods. In our implementation, Rank SVM is used

Representative Image Selection Overlapped Subspace Clustering

Label Propagation User Labeling Relevant/non-relevant

Multi -Subspace Label Propagation

Fig. 1. Proposed active feedback framework for CBIR.

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bring most information but also keep the mass of labeling tasks very little. It is an effective and efficient way to label images. (2) Since the relationship among images can be easily obtained, we can propagate the labels from the labeled set to some unlabeled images (not all the unlabeled data). By doing so, we expand the training set and make the obtained classifier robust to the noisy unlabeled data, since we only use the high-quality unlabeled data instead of all the unlabeled data. Note that such a strategy is very different from (Wu et al., 2000), which makes use of all the unlabeled images, and is thus sensitive to noise. In fact, from a broader point of view, some previous methods can also be classified into these two units. For example, the most positive and most informative schemes in SVM active learning (Tong and Chang, 2001) may be considered as two methods for representative images selection. Transduction (Wu et al., 2000) and co-training (Chang et al., 2003; Lai and Chang, 2002) algorithms are both aiming at utilizing the unlabeled images. However, the differences between our approaches and those works are: (i) they have not formulated explicit concepts of either representative images selection or label propagation. (ii) In their philosophy, the representative images selection and unlabeled data integration are considered isolated. In contrast, in our framework, these two units are not independent of each other. Actually they are closely interconnected and we try to treat them from a global-optimization viewpoint. As the other components have been extensively studied in previous works, in the following two sections, we focus on the two new components. 4. Representative image selection In this section, we first give the formal definition of representative image. Then, we present the process of representative image selection, which consists of two subphases: feature subspace partitioning and overlapped subspace clustering. 4.1. Representative images When the training set is small, the training performance is very sensitive to the effectiveness of each training example. That is, the statistical characteristics of the labeled images will highly affect the performance of the CBIR system. On one hand, if these images are too similar to each other, there will be too much redundancy which decreases the information capacity; while on the other hand, if there are little consistency among them, the learning algorithm will encounter great difficulty in training a reasonable classifier. In order to make the training more smoothly, we should provide some representative images for user labeling, which should have the following two properties.

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(i) The images should have consistency. Here, the consistency means that these images should have similar behavior in training the classifier. (ii) The images should not contain too much redundancy. To guarantee the first property, we select representative images from a sub image set with consistent characteristics instead of the whole image database. We call this sub set as ‘‘estimated possibly positive image set (EPPIS)”. That is, EPPIS contains a subset of images, which are most likely relevant to the query. Note that EPPIS is a dynamic image collection, which will change after each iteration of user’s feedback. In the beginning of retrieval, EPPIS contains those images nearest to the query point (with some distance measurement). After the learning machine is trained, it will be used to test all the samples in the whole image collection. Only those images classified to be positive with high confidence will be included in the next-round EPPIS. To guarantee the second property, we introduce the following definitions first. Definition 1 (Element–set distance). Given a finite set X = {x1, x2, . . ., xN} with N elements in it, for a subset Y = {y1, y2, . . ., yM} of X, the distance between some element x 2 X and Y is defined as dðx; YÞ ¼ min dðx; y i Þ y i 2Y

ð1Þ

where d(x, yi) is the element–element distance. For d(x, yi), we can adopt any distance metrics in the original feature space, such as Euclidean (Carson et al., 1999; Rui et al., 1997), Minkowski (Swain and Ballard, 1991; Voorhees and Poggio, 1998) and quadratic (Hafner, 1995; Niblack, 1993) distances; or use kernel functions, such as Gaussian, polynomial and sigmoid kernels (Burges, 1998). We believe it should be better to choose different distances than one deterministic distance for different applications. In the view of information theory, Definition 1 can be explained as follows. If we use an element in Y to take the place of x, the minimal information loss will be d(x, Y). In other words, if we treat Y as a code book, d(x, Y) displays the residue when using Y to encode x. Definition 2 (Set–set distance). Given a set X = {x1, x2, . . ., xN} and the element–set distance, for two subsets Y, Z  X, the distance from Y to Z is defined as dðY; ZÞ ¼

X

dðy; ZÞ

ð2Þ

y2Y

Note that the set–set distance is not symmetric: d(Y, Z) 6¼ d(Z, Y). This is easy to understand: if Y  Z and Y 6¼ Z, we have d(Y, Z) = 0 while d(Z, Y) > 0. Similarly, d(Y, Z) displays the information loss when encoding Y with the code book Z. Actually d(Y, Z) is a decreasing function of Z: if Z1  Z2, d(Y, Z1) P d(Y, Z2). Intuitive

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explanation is that the bigger the code book is, the less the information loss will be. With the above two definitions, representative image set, which is the collection of representative images in CBIR, can be defined as below. Definition 3 (Representative image set). The NR-element representative image set R of EPPIS is R ¼ arg minfdðEPPIS; YÞjY  EPPIS; N Y ¼ N R g Y

ð3Þ

where NY is the number of elements in Y. That is to say, we choose a subset of EPPIS as the representative image set, to which EPPIS has the smallest set–set distance. From the view of coding theory, the representative image set is the best code book with NR elements for EPPIS, and it has the minimum information loss to encode EPPIS. 4.2. Feature subspace partitioning According to Definition 3, if one first partitions the EPPIS into NR clusters, the centroid of each cluster will be the representative image. In the following discussions, we use f() to indicate a specific clustering algorithm. As well known, image features are of high dimensions. When a user searches the database, his/her focuses on different feature subspaces are not equal to each other. In some cases, color may be the dominant subspace, while in some other cases shape may be more important. For example, blue color is the dominant subspace when user searches for sky images; and shape is the dominant subspace when user searches for cars images. To better model user’s retrieval behavior, we firstly partition the image features into subspaces, give each subspace different weight, and then select representative images for each subspace separately. Here, our assumption for subspace partitioning is that the features in a same subspace should share some statistical consistency. To model this, we treat every feature (e.g. one dimension of color moment) as a discrete random variable (taking values over the whole EPPIS). Since most image features are not discrete, we quantize them before adopting K. Pearson v2 statistic (Mario, 2003) to test the statistical dependency between any two features. Specifically, for two features F1 and F2, XX v2 ðF 1 ; F 2 Þ ¼ f

g 2



ðP ðF 1 ¼ f ; F 2 ¼ gÞ  P ðF 1 ¼ f ÞP ðF 2 ¼ gÞÞ P ðF 1 ¼ f ÞP ðF 2 ¼ gÞ

ð4Þ 2

If v (F1, F2) is small than 3.84 (as widely used in the literature, Mario, 2003), they are regarded as dependent and put into the same subspace. The details of feature subspace partitioning algorithm are given in Table 1 (where NF is the dimensionality of image features):

Table 1 Feature subspace partitioning algorithm Input: EPPIS X = {x1, x2, . . ., xN}, in which xi is a NF-dimensional vector Output: partitioning of NF features (i) Quantize each feature into several bins, and compute the v2 statistic between any two features so as to get an NF  NF matrix. Initially, treat each feature as a subspace; (ii) If there exist features in two subspaces which are dependent, merge these two subspaces; (iii) Go to (ii) until the remained subspaces can no longer be merged. And then output the final subspace partitioning

As aforementioned, the different subspace may not be equally important. We introduce the concept of subspace weight to address this point. Suppose there are totally N subspaces {C(n)}, where n = 1, 2, . . ., N. L(n) is the set containing the projections of all the positive examples (labeled by user feedback) on C(n). If L(n) is empty, set all the subspace weights X(n) = 1/N; else calculate the subspace weight of C(n) by X N 1 1 ð5Þ XðnÞ ¼ ðnÞ ðkÞ c c k¼1 P where cðnÞ ¼ x2LðnÞ ;y2LðnÞ ðd ðnÞ ðx; yÞÞ2 ; and d ðnÞ ð; Þ denotes the element–element distance metric for subspace C(n). Note that the weight of a subspace displays the attention the user pays on this subspace. Bigger the weight, the user has more interest in this subspace. 4.3. Overlapped subspace clustering After partitioning the feature space and calculating the weight for each subspace, we can cluster images in each subspace. The number of clusters for each subspace is proportional to its weight. Here we show an example. Suppose we get two feature subspaces with weight 0.6 and 0.4 separately, and we want to select 10 representative images from the EPPIS. Firstly, we partition EPPIS into six clusters in the first subspace and four clusters in the second subspace. Secondly, the image nearest to the centroid of each cluster is selected as representative images. The detailed clustering algorithm is shown in Table 2. Note that if we cluster images in each subspace independently, we may select a same representative image from two different subspaces. To avoid this problem, in step (iii) we do clustering from subspace associated with the largest weight to subspace associated with the smallest weight. Suppose the subspace C(1), C(2), . . ., C(N) is ordered by descent weight. Starting from C(1), suppose we have already selected representative image set for C(n) (denoted by R(n)). Then for C(n+1), after a representative image is selected, it will be projected back onto all C(m) (m 6 n + 1) to see whether it is close enough (with the element–element distance d(m)(,)) to any representative images in R(m). If so, delete it and split the cluster for C(n+1) with the largest average element–element distance into two new clusters and update the representative images set

T. Qin et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 29 (2008) 637–646 Table 2 Overlapped subspace clustering algorithm Input: EPPIS, partitioning C(1), C(2), . . ., C(N) of the whole feature space and the corresponding weight X(1), X(2), . . ., X(N) for each feature subspace Output: representative image set (i) Sort N subspaces by weight in a descent order: X(i1) P X(i2) P ,. . ., P X(iN). (ii) Allocate the cluster number for each subspace according to its weight. The total cluster number equals K, the number of images for users to label in each iteration. Roughly speaking, the cluster number for C(in) will be [X(iN)K] (where [x] is the inteP ger part of x). ItPis possible that Nin¼1 ½XðinÞ K < K. In such case N ðinÞ the extra ðK  in¼1 ½X KÞ clusters are assigned to C(i1). In such a way, we get the final assignment of cluster numbers {K(in)}, n = 1, 2, . . ., N. (iii) For each subspace C(in), use clustering algorithm f() to generate K(in) clusters and select the representative images set R(in). S (iv) Get the final representative image set R ¼ Nn¼1 RðnÞ :

accordingly. In this case, there will be K(n+1) + 1 clusters for C(n+1), but the number of representative images is still K(n+1). This process continues until the selection of R(n+1) becomes stable. To summarize, the main idea of our algorithm is to select the representative images through different subspaces: (i) subspaces with different user attention are assigned with different weights, thus represented by different number of clusters and images; (ii) clusters for different subspaces are overlapped in sense that an image can belong to different clusters in different subspaces; (iii) the selected images can represent their cluster well in sense of Definition 3; (iv) the representative images are not too close to each other in any subspace. In such a way, this algorithm can capture the user attention and handle the nonidentity among different subspaces well. In fact, the output of the above clustering process is not only some images for user labeling, but also the basis of label propagation, which will be introduced in the next section.

and explicit (Ortega-Binderberger and Mehrotra, 2003), empirical studies have shown that users typically give very little feedback and that the flexibility of multiple levels of relevance is too burdensome (Jansen et al., 2000). As a result, the most popular mode for the user to label images converged to the binary approach: an image is either relevant (positive) or not (negative). Maybe we can regard binary labels on the representative images as reasonable; however, it will not be suitable to do with the unlabeled images in the same deterministic manner. Our idea here is to estimate a fuzzy relevance r 2 (1, +1) for the unlabeled images based on the binary labels (+1 and 1) of the labeled images. More specifically, (i) only if labeled image L and unlabeled image U have some kind of similarity, should we propagate the label of L to U; (ii) user’s attention may focus on different subspaces of an image for different queries, so the propagation should be carried out subspace-wise. Based on these ideas, we propose the ‘‘multi-subspace label propagation” algorithm.

5.2. Multi-subspace label propagation The proposed algorithm is built on top of overlapped subspace clustering method. Its structure is shown in Fig. 2. There exist multiple paths to propagate from a labeled image L to an unlabeled image U. These propagation paths are in different subspaces and summed with corresponding subspace weights. Specifically, in the path of C(n), whether the label of L will be propagated to U depends on the relationship between their projections on C(n). Only if their projections are in the same cluster, we will use the following mechanism to propagate the label. Suppose the projections of L and U (denoted by L(n) and ðnÞ (n) U ) on C(n) are both in the ith cluster ci , and the set ðnÞ ðnÞ Li and U i contain the projections of all the labeled ðnÞ and unlabeled images that fall in ci respectively. Then, ðnÞ ðnÞ ðnÞ ðnÞ we have L 2 Li and U 2 U i . L’s propagation

5. Label propagation After the clustering process, a set of representative images are selected and returned to the users for their feedbacks. As a result, each of the representative images will get a label. In this section, we discuss how to propagate these labels to the whole EPPIS set based on the clusters generated by overlapped subspace clustering. This process can help to solve the insufficient training sample problem by enlarging the training set. Firstly, we introduce the general concept of label propagation; and then we propose the multi-subspace label propagation algorithm. 5.1. Concept of label propagation Although there are many ways for the user to supply his feedback in literature, such as goodness/badness, ranking

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Fig. 2. Structure of multi-subspace label propagation.

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Table 3 Multi-subspace label propagation algorithm Suppose there are totally N subspaces {C(n)}, n = 1, . . . , N. For each ðnÞ ðnÞ C(n), K(n) clusters are generated: ci ; i ¼ 1; . . . K ðnÞ . Li contains all ðnÞ the projections of the labeled images on C(n) that fall in ci . Then, the estimated relevance for an unlabeled images U (whose projection on C(n) is U(n)) is   P P ðnÞ P ðnÞ ð7Þ rðU Þ ¼ Nn¼1 Ki¼1 l2LðnÞ XðnÞ  xi ðlðnÞ ; U ðnÞ Þ  RðlÞ

iments on a collection with 5000 images are introduced; thirdly, we give an intuitive example to show the advantage of our framework; at last, we report the performance of the proposed active feedback framework on a large collection with more than 60,000 images. 6.1. Experiment setup

i

where R(l) is the binary label of the representative image whose projection on C(n) is l(n)

influence (called element weight) on U in this subspace path is determined by ðnÞ

xi ðLðnÞ ; U ðnÞ Þ ¼ P

1 d ðnÞ ðLðnÞ ;U ðnÞ Þ 1 ðnÞ u2U i d ðnÞ ðLðnÞ ;uÞ

ð6Þ

Let the element weight between two images whose projections are not in the same cluster be zero, the above process can be formulated as in Table 3. We would like to point out the following two properties of our algorithm: 1. Labels can be propagated through different subspace paths. Hence, the propagation may happen more than once between two images. 2. There is the case that an unlabeled image is propagated with a positive relevance in one subspace path, while with a negative relevance in another. For example, when a user wants to find the images with white flowers, an unlabeled image with red flowers may get a positive relevance by the subspaces of texture and shape but negative relevance by the color subspaces. This is reasonable and can help to capture user’s attention. After propagating the labels to each unlabeled image in EPPIS, both labeled and unlabeled, will be used to train the retrieval engine. Because the relevance of an unlabeled image is not binary but distributed in (1, 1), rank-SVM (Joachims, 2002) algorithm is adopted in our paper to fulfill the corresponding training task. Since the unlabeled images in EPPIS are much more than the labeled ones, to remove the fear that the labeled images are overwhelmed by unlabeled images, we only use those unlabeled images whose relevance r satisfies |r| > 0.3 for training in our experiments. With the proposed clustering, propagation and rankSVM, we have developed an effective approach to solve the insufficient training sample problem in relevance feedback. Experiments in the next section showed that our approach can improve the retrieval performance by much. 6. Experiments In this section, we tested the effectiveness of proposed active feedback framework. Firstly, we describe the benchmark of our experiments; secondly, comprehensively exper-

To avoid the image collection bias, we used two subsets of COREL as our benchmark. There are totally 50 categories in the first subset with 100 images in each category. There are 542 categories with total 60,196 images in the second subset, and each category has 50–150 images. Since the first subset is relatively small, we investigated the performance of the two new units of our framework comprehensively on this subset. We only test the performance of the whole framework on the second subset. In our automatic testing, the category label serves as the ground truth: the images in the same category of the query are treated as relevant/positive images, which is the same with previous works. For feature selection, we totally used 384 image features: 256 HSV histogram, 9 Luv moment, 104 wavelet texture descriptors (Chang and Kuo, 1993) and 15 MRSAR (Mao and Jain, 1992) descriptors. We use the retrieval precision in each step of iteration as the performance measurement, defined as the percentage of the positive images in all the retrieval results. That is Precision ¼

relevant images retrieved in top N returns N ð7Þ

6.2. Results on the first image collection For this subset, an exhaustive test scheme was adopted: all the 5000 images were used as query and five feedbacks were simulated. The average performance among all these 5000 images was calculated to indicate the performance of the retrieval algorithms. For the clustering algorithm, we adopted K-mean with Euclidean distance metric for simplicity.2 For all the SVM methods used in this sub section, we adopted the Gaussian kernel with default parameter setting in SVMlight (Joachims, 1999). In the first experiment, we tested the impact of EPPIS size on the performance of the proposed algorithms. The top-20 retrieval accuracy with varying EPPIS size was listed in Fig. 3. From the results, we could get the following conclusions: (i) the performance of our algorithm was not sensitive to the EPPIS size. While the EPPIS size increased from 50 to 200, the retrieval performance only changed less than 2%. (ii) Just as discussed in

2

In fact, our additional experiments show that which clustering algorithm we used does not lead to much difference of the final retrieval accuracy.

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To test the label propagation unit, we used the following two retrieval schemes. The first one was ‘‘OSC + User Labeling + SVM”, while the second was ‘‘OSC + User Labeling + MSLP (multi-subspace label propagation) + rank-SVM”. The average top-20 performance was listed in Fig. 5. We found that MSLP improved the

Fig. 3. Performance comparison with different EPPIS sizes.

Section 4, if the EPPIS size was too small or too large, the performance would drop, although not much. (iii) The best setting of the EPPIS size in Fig. 3 is about 100 images. Considering this is a top-20 case, we used the EPPIS size of 5  K (K is the number of the labeled images in each iteration) in the following experiments (including Sections 6.2 and 6.3) while comparing to other reference algorithms. In the second experiment, we tested the added-values of the two new units in our framework. First we inserted the representative images selection unit to a SVM-based relevance feedback framework. The comparison algorithms included (Tong and Chang, 2001; Jing et al., 2003), also SVM-based frameworks. The main difference was that we selected the representative images by overlapped subspace clustering (OSC) while they selected the most informative and the most positive images for the users to label. The average top-20 accuracy was shown in Fig. 4. From this figure, we can see that our method was about 5% more accurate than the most informative selection scheme and 10% better than most positive scheme after five iterations. That is to say, the representative image selection unit (with OSC algorithm) is effective.

Fig. 5. Comparison of the retrieval systems with and without label propagation.

Fig. 6. Retrieval accuracy (top-20).

Fig. 4. Comparison of different image selection schemes.

Fig. 7. Retrieval accuracy (top-30).

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Fig. 8. The final results of SVM-MP.

retrieval performance by another 5%, validating the effectiveness of label propagation. In the third experiment, we tested the overall performance of the proposed active feedback framework. For simplicity, we named our framework by ‘‘SCLP (subspace clustering and label propagation)” in following descriptions. We compared our SCLP framework with several previous works, including the most informative SVM (SVM-MI) (Tong and Chang, 2001), the most positive SVM (SVM-MP) (Jing et al., 2003) and Rui’s re-weighting method (Rui et al., 1998). Figs. 6 and 7 showed the results of the average top-20 and top-30 retrieval accuracy respectively. For all cases, both SVM-MP and SVM-MI had higher performance than Rui’s method, while SCLP always performed the best. For the top-20 case, SCLP outperformed SVM-MP and SVM-MI by about 10%; for the top-30 case, SCLP leaded to more than 13% higher accuracy. 6.3. An intuitive example In previous subsection, we investigated the performance of the framework by statistical average of many queries. In this subsection, we will have a look at the final retrieval results of a specific query to give some intuitive impress about the framework. Fig. 8 showed the final results of SVM-MP after five iterations for a query ‘‘lion”, which was in the red solid box3 of the figure. As seen, the two images in blue dashed

3 For interpretation of color in Fig. 8, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.

box were irrelevant to the query. However, since the low level visual feature of these two images were very similar to other relevant images, they were returned after five iterations. Fig. 9 showed the final results of our framework (SCLP) after 5 iterations for the same query in the red solid box.4 All the returned images were relevant to the query. Comparing with Fig. 8, we could see that the two images in blue dashed box were a little different with other images: they had green background. Because of the green background, they were not very closed to other relevant images, and so SVM-MP could not treat them as relevant images. On the contrary, the two algorithms in our framework were based on subspace, and they could discover the similarity between these two images and the query. That is, our framework could find their similarity in texture subspace and their similarity in green color subspace (since the query image also had some green background). So the multi-subspace label propagation algorithm could propagate the positive label to these two images from subspaces, and retrieve them as relevant images. However, since the most positive images in SVM-MP were very similar to each other and the query, SVM-MP algorithm could not retrieve the images with similarity only in some subspaces. 6.4. Results on the second image collection For this subset with 60,196 images, we randomly selected 1000 images as queries and 5 feedbacks for each

4 For interpretation of color in Fig. 9, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.

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Fig. 9. The final results of our active feedback framework.

query were simulated. Similarly to the previous subsection, the average performance among these 1000 images was calculated to measure the performance of the retrieval algorithms. We also adopted K-mean with Euclidean distance metric for clustering and Gaussian kernel for SVM. Since Rui’s method (Rui et al., 1998) performed not so well as other methods in Section 6.2, in this subsection we only compared our active feedback framework with the most informative SVM (SVM-MI) (Tong and Chang, 2001) and the most positive SVM (SVM-MP) (Jing et al., 2003). Table 4 showed the results of the average top-20 and top-30 retrieval accuracy. For the top-20 case, our active feedback framework performed best, with 3.3% improvement over SVM-MP and 2.8% improvement over SVMMI after five iterations. For the top-30 case, our framework performed best again, with 2.3% improvement over SVMMP and 2.7% improvement over SVM-MI after five iterations. Due to the large scale of this image collection, one can see that the retrieval accuracies of all these algorithms were Table 4 Retrieval accuracy Iteration

0 1 2 3 4 5

Top-20

Top-30

SCLP

SVM-MP

SVM-MI

SCLP

SVM-MP

SVM-MI

0.115 0.130 0.179 0.231 0.286 0.338

0.115 0.123 0.160 0.206 0.258 0.305

0.115 0.123 0.161 0.208 0.260 0.310

0.071 0.084 0.112 0.145 0.180 0.211

0.071 0.076 0.095 0.123 0.156 0.188

0.071 0.076 0.096 0.122 0.153 0.184

Table 5 Relative improvement of SCLP Iteration

1 2 3 4 5

Top-20

Top-30

Improvement over SVMMP (%)

Improvement over SVMMI (%)

Improvement over SVMMP (%)

Improvement over SVMMI (%)

5.69 11.87 12.13 10.85 10.82

5.69 11.18 11.05 10 9.03

10.53 17.89 17.89 15.38 12.23

10.53 16.67 18.85 17.65 14.67

much lower than those reported in the previous subsection. Correspondingly, the absolute improvements are also smaller on this collection. However, if we have a look at the relative improvement of SCLP as shown in Table 5, we can find that SCLP still greatly outperformed SVM-MP and SVM-MI. To summarize, for our proposed framework, it is easy to select internal parameters because the retrieval performance is not very sensitive to the EPPIS size. Both the two new units contribute to the whole performance of the active feedback framework. Tested on two general data sets, our framework was proved to have higher retrieval accuracy than those reference algorithms examined in this paper. 7. Conclusions In this paper, an active feedback framework has been proposed to handle the insufficient training sample

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T. Qin et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 29 (2008) 637–646

problem for content based image retrieval. In this framework, two new units, representative image selection (with overlapped subspace clustering algorithm) and label propagation (with multi-subspace label propagation algorithm) were developed. As the two algorithms share the idea of subspace partitioning and clustering, they can not only handle the insufficient training sample case, but also capture the user’s attention on specific sub feature spaces when retrieving the image database. Tested on general large scale image databases, the framework has demonstrated very promising retrieval accuracy. Acknowledgement Special thanks should be given to Guang Feng, Bin Gao, Qiankun Zhao, Huimin Yan and Huaiyuan Yang for their sincerely helps. References Burges, C., 1998. A tutorial on support vector machines for pattern recognition. Data Min. Knowl. Discov. 2 (2), 121–167. Carson, C., Thomas, M., Belongie, S., Hellerstein, J.M., Malik, J., 1999. Blobworld: A system for region-based image indexing and retrieval. In: Proc. 3rd Internat. Conf. on Visual Information and Information System (VISUAL’99), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 1999. Chang, E., Li, B., Wu, G., Goh, K.S., 2003. Statistical learning for effective visual information retrieval. In: Proc. IEEE Internat. Conf. on Image Processing (ICIP’03), Barcelona, September 2003, pp. 609–612. Chang, T., Kuo, C.-CJ., 1993. Texture analysis and classification with tree-structured wavelet transform. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 2 (4), 429–441. Chen, Y., Zhou, X.S., Huang, T.S., 2001. One-class SVM for learning in image retrieval. In: Proc. IEEE Internat. Conf. on Image Processing (ICIP’2001), Thessaloniki, Greece, October 7–10, 2001, pp. 815–818. Donoho, D.L., 2000. High-dimensional data analysis: The curses and blessings of dimensionality. American Math Society Lecture – Math Challenges of the 21st Century. Hafner, J. et al., 1995. Efficient color histogram indexing for quadratic form distance functions. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Machine Intell. 17 (7), 729–736. Jansen, B.J., Spink, A., Saracevic, T., 2000. Real life, real users and real needs: A study and analysis of users queries on the web. Inform. Process. Manage. 36 (2), 207–227.

Jing, F., Li, M.J., Zhang, H.J., Zhang, B., 2003. Support vector machines for region-based image retrieval. In: Proc. IEEE Internat. Conf. on Multimedia & Expo. Joachims, T., 1999. Making large-scale SVM learning practical. In: Scho¨lkopf, B., Burges, C., Smola, A. (Eds.), Advances in Kernel Methods – Support Vector Learning. MIT-Press. Joachims, T., 2002. Optimizing search engines using click through data. In: Proc. ACM Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), ACM, pp. 133–142. Lai, W.C., Chang, E., 2002. Hybrid learning schemes for multimedia information retrieval. In: Proc. IEEE Pacific Rim Conf. on Multimedia, December 2002, pp. 556–563. Mao, J.C., Jain, A.K., 1992. Texture classification and segmentation using multiresolution simultaneous autoregressive models. Pattern Recognition 25 (2), 173–188. Mario, F.T., 2003. Elementary Statistics, Ninth Edition. Niblack, W., et al., 1993. Querying images by content, using color, texture, and shape. In: Proc. SPIE Conf. on Storage and Retrieval for Image and Video Database, vol. 1908, April 1993, pp. 173–187. Ortega-Binderberger, M., Mehrotra, S., 2003. Relevance feedback in multimedia databases. Handbook of Video Databases: Design and Applications. CRC Press. Rui, Y., Huang, T.S., Ortega, M., Mehrotra, S., 1998. Relevance feedback: A power tool in interactive content-based image retrieval. IEEE Trans. Circ. Syst. Video Technol. 8 (5), 644–655. Rui, Y., Huang, T.S., 1999. A novel relevance feedback technique in image retrieval. In: Proc. 7th ACM Conf. on Multimedia. 1999, pp. 67–70. Rui, Y., Huang, T.S., Mehrotra, S., 1997. Content-based image retrieval with relevance feedback in MARS. In: Proc. Internat. Conf. on Image Processing, pp. 815–818. Su, Z., Zhang, H J., Ma, S., 2001. Relevant feedback using a Bayesian classifier in content-based image retrieval. In: Proc. SPIE Electronic Imaging 2001, San Jose, CA. Swain, M.J., Ballard, D.H., 1991. Color indexing. Internat. J. Comput. Vision 7 (1), 11–32. Tieu, K., Viola, P., 2000. Boosting image retrieval. In: Proc. IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 228–235. Tong, S., Chang, E., 2001. Support vector machine active leaning for image retrieval. In: Proc. 9th ACM Conf. on Multimedia, Ottawa, Canada, pp. 107–118. Vapnik, V., 1998. Statistical Learning Theory. Wiley. Vasconcelos, N., Lippman, A., 1999. Learning from user feedback in image retrieval systems. In: Proc. 13th Conf. on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS’99). Voorhees, H., Poggio, T., 1998. Computing texture boundaries from images. Nature 333, 364–367. Wu, Y., Tian, Q., Huang, T.S. 2000. Integrating unlabeled images for image retrieval based on relevance feedback. In Proc. 15th Internat. Conf. on Pattern Recognition (ICPR’2000), vol. I, pp. 21–24.

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