Pre-classification Module for an All-Season Image Retrieval System

From the study of attention-driven image interpretation and retrieval, we have found that an attention-driven strategy is able to extract important objects from an image and then focus the attentive objects while retrieving images. However, besides the images with distinct objects, there are images which do not show distinct objects. In this paper, the classification of "attentive" and "non-attentive" image is proposed to be a pre-process module in an all-season image retrieval system which can tackle both kinds of images. In this pre-classification module, an image is represented by an adaptive tree structure with each node carrying normalized features that characterize the object/region with visual contrasts and spatial information. Then a neural network is trained to classify an image as an "attentive" or "non-attentive" category by using the Back Propagation Through Structure (BPTS) algorithm. Experimental results indicate the reliability and feasibility of the pre-classification module, which encourages us to conduct further investigations on the all-season image retrieval system.