Semisupervised Biased Maximum Margin Analysis for Interactive Image Retrieval

With many potential practical applications, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has attracted substantial attention during the past few years. A variety of relevance feedback (RF) schemes have been developed as a powerful tool to bridge the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic concepts, and thus to improve the performance of CBIR systems. Among various RF approaches, support-vector-machine (SVM)-based RF is one of the most popular techniques in CBIR. Despite the success, directly using SVM as an RF scheme has two main drawbacks. First, it treats the positive and negative feedbacks equally, which is not appropriate since the two groups of training feedbacks have distinct properties. Second, most of the SVM-based RF techniques do not take into account the unlabeled samples, although they are very helpful in constructing a good classifier. To explore solutions to overcome these two drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a biased maximum margin analysis (BMMA) and a semisupervised BMMA (SemiBMMA) for integrating the distinct properties of feedbacks and utilizing the information of unlabeled samples for SVM-based RF schemes. The BMMA differentiates positive feedbacks from negative ones based on local analysis, whereas the SemiBMMA can effectively integrate information of unlabeled samples by introducing a Laplacian regularizer to the BMMA. We formally formulate this problem into a general subspace learning task and then propose an automatic approach of determining the dimensionality of the embedded subspace for RF. Extensive experiments on a large real-world image database demonstrate that the proposed scheme combined with the SVM RF can significantly improve the performance of CBIR systems.