Localized content-based image retrieval using saliency-based graph learning framework

Localized content-based image retrieval (LCBIR) has emerged as a hot topic more recently due to the fact that in the scenario of CBIR, the user is interested in a portion of the image and the rest of the image is irrelevant. In this paper, we propose a novel region-level relevance feedback method to solve the LCBIR problem. Firstly, the visual attention model is employed to measure the regional saliency of each image in the feedback image set provided by the user. Secondly, the regions in the image set are constructed to form an affinity matrix and a novel propagation energy function is defined which takes both low-level visual features and regional significance into consideration. After the iteration, regions in the positive images with high confident scores are selected as the candidate query set to conduct the next-round retrieval task until the retrieval results are satisfactory. Experimental results conducted on both COREL and SFVAL datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.