Factorial Correspondence Analysis for image retrieval

We are concerned by the use of factorial correspondence analysis (FCA) for image retrieval. FCA is designed for analyzing contingency tables. In textual data analysis (TDA), FCA analyzes a contingency table crossing terms/words and documents. To adapt FCA on images, we first define "visual words" computed from scalable invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptors in images and use them for image quantization. At this step, we can build a contingency table crossing "visual words" as terms/words and images as documents. The method was tested on the Caltech4 and Stewenius and Nister datasets on which it provides better results (quality of results and execution time) than classical methods as tf * idf and probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA). To scale up and improve the retrieval quality, we propose a new retrieval schema using inverted files based on the relevant indicators of correspondence analysis (representation quality of images on axes and contribution of images to the inertia of the axes). The numerical experiments show that our algorithm performs faster than the exhaustive method without losing precision.