Adaptive tree similarity learning for image retrieval

Learning-enhanced relevance feedback is one of the most promising and active research directions in content-based image retrieval in recent years. However, the existing approaches either require prior knowledge of the data or converge slowly and are thus not coneffective. Motivated by the successful history of optimal adaptive filters, we present a new approach to interactive image retrieval based on an adaptive tree similarity model to solve these difficulties. The proposed tree model is a hierarchical nonlinear Boolean representation of a user query concept. Each path of the tree is a clustering pattern of the feedback samples, which is small enough and local in the feature space that it can be approximated by a linear model nicely. Because of the linearity, the parameters of the similartiy model are better learned by the optimal adaptive filter, which does not require any prior knowledge of the data and supports incremental learning with a fast convergence rate. The proposed approach is simple to implement and achieves better performance than most approaches. To illustrate the performance of the proposed approach, extensive experiments have been carried out on a large heterogeneous image collection with 17,000 images, which render promising results on a wide variety of queries.